“So!—you have begun to notice what I have known for years!” he said lightly—“Clever young man! What fine fairy finger is pointing out to you my deficiencies, while supplying your own? Do you learn to estimate the priceless value of love while contemplating the romantic groves and woodlands of The Islands? Do you read poetry there?—or write it? Or talk it?”
Prince Humphry coloured,—then grew very pale.
“When I misuse my time, Sir,” he said—“Surely it will then be needful to catechise me on the manner in which I spend it,—but not till then!”
“Fairly put!” answered the King—“But I have an idea—it may be a mistaken idea,—still I have it—that you are misusing your time, Humphry! And this is the cause of our present little discussion. If I knew that you occupied yourself with the pleasures befitting your age and rank, I should be more at ease.”
“What do you consider to be the pleasures befitting my age and rank?” asked the Prince with a touch of satire; “Making a fool of myself generally?”
The King smiled.
“Well!—it would be better to make a fool of yourself generally than particularly! Folly is not so harmful when spread like jam over a whole slice of bread,—but it may cause a life-long sickness, if swallowed in one secret gulp of sweetness!”
The Prince moved uneasily.
“You think I am catechising you,—and you resent it—but, my dear boy, let me again remind you that you are in a manner answerable to the nation for your actions; and especially to that particular section of the nation called Society. Society is the least and worst part of the whole community—but it has to be considered by such servants of the public as ourselves. You know what James the First of England wrote concerning the ‘domestic regulations’ on the conduct of a prince and future king? ‘A king is set as one on a stage, whose smallest, actions and gestures all the people gazinglie do behold; and, however just in the discharge of his office, yet if his behaviour be light or dissolute, in indifferent actions, the people, who see but the outward part, conceive preoccupied conceits of the king’s inward intention, which although with time, the trier of all truth, will evanish by the evidence of the contrarie effect, yet, interim patitur justus, and prejudged conceits will, in the meantime, breed contempt, the mother of rebellion and disorder.’ Poor James of the ‘goggle eyes and large hysterical heart’ as Carlyle describes him! Do you not agree with his estimate of a royal position?”
“I am not aware, Sir, that my behaviour can as yet be called light or dissolute;” replied the Prince coldly, with a touch of hauteur.