NEWS OF THE WEEK.
THE event—announced in part of our first edition, and the whole of the second, last Saturday—which has engrossed most attention throughout the week, has been the birth of an heir-presumptive to the British Throne. After not a few sinister rumours, mixed Ivith sad recollections of the Princess CHARLOTTE, the Queen's giving birth in saatty to a living child—though of the wrong sex—lots been welcomed with much real gladness. At a time when the succession has become a matter of anxiety to many good people, who looked forward with greater dread than we profess to feel lest the crown should devolve upon a foreign King, this joyful disper- sion of the shadows of gloomy imagination, s one of the things which all sections and conditions of' a community have a sympathy with.
Apart from these feelings, and viewing the details of this royal birth as they are recorded with minute particularity in the news- papers, there is a good deal to marvel at. The preservation of' the old forms of legal recognition and court etiquette, adapted to an age and to circumstances entirely different from-the present, speaks little for the march of intellect in the highest region of our society. Reform, which has limped badly enough in most departments of the Government, has made a dead halt at the threshold of the Palace. It is still deemed necessary to summon the Privy Coun- cillors to be present when the Queen " gives day," as the Frcnah express it, to a child. Putting out of view the suffering and danger of the mother in one of nature's severest trials, the assemblage of Privy Councillors waiting in an antechamber with open door, to bear the first cries of the royal baby, would form a proper subject for the caricaturist. Luckily, the expected sounds soon gratified the noble and right honourable ears. The Mint's screams, we are bold, testified the strength of its lungs: they might also be regarded as its protest against a custom which is as repugnant to common sense as it is to decency. This assembly of the Privy Council at the Queen's lying-in, while it serves to intimate suspicion of impo- sition, affords not the slightest guarantee against fraud. The Arch- bishop of CANTERRURY, Lord MlimmuaNE, and the rest of the Privy Council, must be more clever than the most experienced nurse, if from their momentary sight of the little screamirg creature they can undertake to swear to its identity in an hour after. The Privy Councillors are supposed to be in the Queen's bedroom and present at the birth. By a fiction of the law and the contrivance of builders, the Queen is secured from this aggra- vation of the outrage ; and it would be advisable that, by a further stretch of the law's imagination, the Privy Councillors should be presumed to be in the Queen's presence though trans- acting business in their respective offices.
