THE PRINCE OF WALES.

Manawatu Times, Volume II, Issue 28, 24 January 1877, Page 3

THE PRINCE OF WALES.

(From the " World.") Nothing could be less to be desired than that Maryborough House should be the resort of spectacled savants, narrow pedants, and bookish philosophers. But it might at least be expected that m the interest of the public some attention should be paid to tho.se who are the special objects of popularity and honor, m a quarter m which, nothing can be hid from the public eye. It might at least have been thought that the Prince, who will probably be some day or other King of England, would have by this time arrived at the conclusion that the pleasantry .of wine flushed subalterns and the practical jests of under-graduates at the end of term did not become the dignity of the middle-aged heir of the oldest, and most illustrious, and the most powerful monarchy m the world. It might at least have been anticipated that if gilded youths, who, without fear are yetscarcely without reproach, were not excluded from the balls of Marlborough House and the garden parties of Chis-wii-k, the guests of the other sex should be proof against the shafts of slander, and should not include grass widows, unattached wives, and frisky matrons, whom for the sake of his own reputation and that of his family, no person of the upper middle class would venture to invite to his house. It might have been thought that the Prince of Wales would be so far alive to a sense of his own dignity, and what is due to others, as to refrain from employing m public offensive language to a noble-man deservedly popular andesteemed, or would, at least occasionally, show that he could practically understand the full inport of the adage noblesse oblige. Unhappily each of these expectations has been so far falsified. If the evil ended where it began, it would not perhaps greatly matter. But that is what it does not and cannot do. The Prince of Wales sets, and will continue to set, the fashion to English society. He is, as we have already said, the first and chief representative of the aristocratic principle, and hence it is that personal character is growing a matter to which less consideration is attached m high places ; that the border line which seperates innocence from criminality is becoming more perilously narrow ; that feminine virtue is a matter of increasing indifference ; that escapades are committed one season and ignored the next ; that the horse-play of clowns at a country fair is not looked upon as inconsistent with the highest breeding ; that the conversation of society is as slangy, and pitched m as low a key, as its ethics are dubious. It is only due to the sound sense and the innate good feeling of the English character that the royal encouragement to laxity of all sorts has not resulted m the descent to a level yet more deplorably low.