A valued correspondent sends us the following note. The matter
seems to us of no importance, but the blunder frets anti- quarians :—Tho Times announces that " Her Royal Highness the Princess of Wales has, by her own desire, been elected a Dame Chevalier° of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem,' a phil- anthropic society presided over by the Duke of Manchester." We infer from the term " philanthropic society" that the Prince of Wales, who has a really scholarly knowledge of the history of the orders of chivalry, has persuaded the Duke of Manchester to drop the preposterous pretension to a connection between his "in- stitution" and the Order of St. John, which have been again and again exposed in the Spectator, in Notes and Queries, and elsewhere, and which any one who refers to p. 810 of this year's edition of the A Imanach de Gotha will see are utterly unfounded. But if the pretension to a connection with the Order of St. John be dropped, why not also drop the name? The "society" might just as well call itself " the Order of the Garter."
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