Page:English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the nineteenth century.djvu/222

 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 Mural, 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, 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.

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