The end of all this interesting story is, that two or three days after, his highness (whom, like Goethe, and unlike the barmaids, and the bookseller's daughters, we always "figure to ourselves as of a dignified aspect") finds his purse and his book in his dressing-gown pocket, so that the whole episode is given to show his Julia what a fine man he is, and how ready his "specimens of innocence" are to fall vanquished at his feet.—"Eich dyn!"
But we must cut his highness short. At Bristol he enters Radcliffe Church while the organ is playing, and stations himself in a corner, whence he could catch a glimpse at the interior:—
"The illiberality of the English Church would not allow me this satisfaction, and the preacher sent an old woman to tell me that I must sit down. As it is not the custom in Catholic churches to interrupt the devotions of a congregation on such light grounds, even if strangers go in without any caution to view whatever is worth seeing in the church, I might justly wonder that English Protestant piety should have so little confidence in its own strength, as to be thus blown about by the slightest breath. The riddle was explained to me afterwards: I should have to pay for my seat, and the truly pious motive was the sixpence. However, I had had enough, and left their mummery without paying."
The substantial veracity of this narrative who can doubt? but that no preacher at Radcliffe Church ever took the slightest notice of his highness we will venture to affirm; the pew-opener might have thought that such a fine man as his highness would like to sit down, or the beadle might have thought it civil to an Israelite—for which he seems to have generally been mistaken—to show him a little Christian charity.
Passing over his highness's account of Bath, and Mr. Beckford, "a sort of Lord Byron in prose, who pays fifty guineas a week for leave to walk in a nursery garden and pick what flowers he chooses;"—of Salisbury, where the prince meets another specimen—"a very pretty young girl," a dress-maker,—and of course takes an opportunity of libelling the bishop, the venerable and excellent Dr. Burgess,—who "never preaches, and draws 15,000l. a-year from his see!"—of Wilton, to which house he obtains admission by a story, and under an assumed name, which he rejoices to hear the housekeeper could neither pronounce nor write;—and some other seats and towns,—we reach London,—his highness's description of which is to occupy the two first, but as yet unpublished, volumes of this work. When he has sufficiently reinspected the "grand foyer," he again mounts the box for Canterbury, criticises the cathedral, the peculiar beauty of which he considers to arise from its not having a screen! and satirizes the archbishop, who enjoys "the rank of a prince" within his jurisdiction, "but not in London,"—as if London were not in the heart of his Grace's jurisdiction,—"moreover, he has sixty thousand a-year! and may marry!" (in the teeth, we presume, of the statute against bigamy.) The "illustrious stranger" proceeds to Dover—thence to Calais—dines with, and of course abuses, Mr. Brummel,—having, by-the-bye, gained admission to his table, as he had done to Lord Pembroke's gallery, under a feigned name! The "thorough lustre" of his principality is then enshrined in the cabriolet of a diligence; he eats smoking hot plinzen with the coachman, and arrives in Paris, where for the present we shall leave him,—and that "sweltering venom" which is luckily neutralized by an unfailing effusion of dulness.
We are sorry that the first Prussian castigator of our manners should have been a prince! We had, at one time, been led to expect the notice of a personage, who, though of not quite princely rank, could have told a much more amusing story,—described "specimens" of a higher order than bar-maids—pecuniary incidents more important than the loss of a ten-pound note out of a sac-de-nuit,—and even wound up his "picture of insular existence" with an interesting appendix to the "Mémoires d'un Homme d'Etat."
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