published by
Fores on the 15th of September, 1817, is one of George Cruikshank's most
finished but at the same time indelicate compositions. It refers to the
rumours affecting the Princess Caroline's reputation which preceded the
"bill of pains and penalties," to which we have already alluded. It
appears to us to have originated out of the following circumstance. It
was asserted that at a masked ball which the princess had given shortly
after she left England to the then King of Naples, Joachim Murat, she
appeared in three different disguises; that in one of these, "The Genius
of History," she had appeared in so unclothed a state as to call for
particular observation; her third disguise was a Turkish costume. It was
further asserted that in her changes of dress she had been assisted, not
by her female attendants, but by the person with whom her name was so
familiarly associated. In the sketch before us, Her Royal Highness's
corpulent and redundant figure is clothed in a tight-fitting Turkish
dress and trousers, her head being covered by a ponderous turban. The
five figures composing her "suite" are the Courier Bartolomeo Bergami,
his brothers Louis and Vollotti Bergami, his sister, and William Austin,
the youth she had adopted,[79] and who, it was proved, slept in her
bed-chamber. The whole are decorated with the crosses and ribbons of the
absurd order which she was said to have instituted. The courtly, well
dressed foreign gentleman to whom she is introducing these vulgar
persons appears to be intended for Metternich, who, while thanking Her
Royal Highness for her "condescension," looks the very picture of
unfeigned but well-bred astonishment.

DEATH OF PRINCESS CHARLOTTE.

In the evening of the 18th of November, 1817, a mournful procession, at
which all the great officers of state attended, quitted Claremont House
_en route_ for Windsor. At the impressive ceremony which followed,
Garter King at Arms proclaimed its melancholy purport in the following
words: "Thus it has pleased Almighty God to take out of this transitory
life, unto His Divine mercy, the late most illustrious Princess
Charlotte Augusta, daughter of His Royal Highness, George, Prince of
Wales, Regent of the United Kingdom." It was even so. The pride and hope
of the nation, the heiress of the crown, was on the 6th of November
delivered of a still-born child, and within a very few hours afterwards
had succumbed to the unlooked-for and fatal exhaustion