the whole way, and who greeted her with the most welcome gratulations, her Serene Highness bowed and smiled in the most affable manner.

A little before three o'clock the Princess alighted at St. James's Palace, and was introduced into the apartments prepared for her reception, looking into Cleveland Row.

Having rested a little after her journey, her Serene Highness appeared at the windows, which were thrown up, that the populace might have a sight of her. The loudest huzzas and cheering took place, exceeded only by those still more ardent and sympathetic congratulations with which this same Princess was recently greeted on her second arrival in the metropolis. To this welcome reception the Princess courtesied with all that condescending grace and affability for which she has ever been so distinguished. These joyful greetings continued for some minutes, until the Prince arrived from Carlton House.

The previous representations of the beauty and accomplishments of his Royal Highness's intended bride, heightened by the portrait which the Duke of Brunswick had sent to him, and which described her Serene Highness in the head-dress she wore on this occasion, all tended to excite the strongest emotions in the breast of the Prince of Wales. He had long borne the character of one of "the best bred princes in Europe;" and he was known to possess a heart keenly susceptible of the tenderest impressions. He had, too, as already

stated, uniformly resisted every former proposal of marriage with a foreign princess; so that it was universally believed, that, in consenting to this union with her Serene Highness, the Princess Caroline, he had been influenced by warmer attachments and considerations than those of mere state policy. That two persons should actually love each other, in the ordinary and daily acceptation of that term, so as to seek an union of so lasting, so tender, and so sacred a nature as that of marriage, who had never in their lives so much as had a single interview-who perhaps never interchanged a single line of correspondence on any subject whateverwhose country, whose language, and whose manners must be essentially different, is too much to -assert. Love is an affair of the heart it is the perfection of friendship, originating in a personal contemplation of some real or imaginary excellence in the object beloved, corresponding with the best feelings of one's own breast. Without some affinities of this nature, there may be great esteem and much reciprocal regard, but there can be no such thing as love: the purest, the divinest, and most sublime affection of the human soul.

No wonder, therefore, that when his Royal Highness the Prince of Wales was first introduced to the Princess Caroline, he should appear to be greatly agitated. He had consented to this union, I doubt not, from as pure and honourable a motive as ever influenced any heir to a throne, under similar circumstances; but, he could not

have entirely forgotten, when he came to behold her who should be bound to him and his destinies by ties which no simple wish or caprice of his, nor any other ordinary circumstances, could ever afterwards dissolve, that his royal breast had, many years before been most powerfully impressed by the warmest affection and love for another; that this object of his early attachment was still in existence, and that the policy of the constitution alone prevented their actual marriage: report, indeed, and that almost universally believed at the time, and by many persisted in to the present hour, stated that his Royal Highness had been married, according to the forms of the catholic church; but this, I am convinced, is a calumny.

It is impossible not to feel that these considerations must press somewhat heavily on the mind of his Royal Highness at this important moment; nor is it unnatural or unreasonable to conjecture, that, probably, the Prince of Wales might, on first seeing the Princess, discover something in her features or manner not exactly corresponding to the exalted ideas he had been previously led to entertain of her. Not that any thing with which we are acquainted could induce the Prince to feel himself in the least disappointed; but we all know the power of imagination, and the ardour with which impressions of female beauty are received by bosoms naturally formed to entertain such sensibilities. Nor does it appear that the Prince himself manifested any other feelings but those of love