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The Prince of Wales probably suffers severely during his tours abroad,
for he is a shy youth; but he also makes many friends, for he is a
delightfully simple and agreeable person. When we used to see him he
looked a good deal like the traditional prince of the fairy tales, for
he was a slender boy with yellow hair, and blue eyes, and a quick pink
blush. And we feel toward him the friendly sense of superiority that the
college alumnus always feels toward the man who was a freshman when he
himself was a senior; for the prince and ourself stood in that relation
a few years ago at a certain haunt of letters.
There was a course of lectures on history that we were to attend. It was
a popular course, and the attendance was large. Arriving late at the
first lecture the room was packed, and we could see from the door that
there was only one empty seat. This happened to be in the very front
row, and wondering how it was that so desirable a place had not been
seized we hastened to it. The lecturer was a swift talker, and we fell
to taking notes busily. Not for some minutes did we have a chance to
scrutinize our surroundings. We then saw that in the adjoining chair sat
the prince, and surmised that no one had wanted to take the chair for
fear of being twitted by his companions for a supposed desire to hobnob
with royalty.
If we remember correctly, it was the prince's first term of college
life. The task of taking notes from a rapid-fire lecturer was plainly
one to which he was not accustomed, and as he wrestled with his notebook
we could see that he had not learned the art of considering the
lecturer's remarks and putting down only the gist of them, in some
abbreviated system of his own, as every experienced student learns.
Grant Robertson, the well-known historian, was lecturing on English
constitutional documents, and his swift and informal utterance was
perfectly easy to summarize if one knew how to get down the important
points and neglect the rest. But the unhappy prince, desperately eager
to do the right thing in this new experience, was trying to write down
every word. If, for instance, Mr. Robertson said (in a humorous aside),
"Henry VIII was a sinful old man with a hobby of becoming a widower,"
the experienced listener would jot down something like this: H 8,
_self-made widower_. But we could see that the prince was laboriously
copying out the sentence in full. And naturally, by the end of a few
paragraphs, he was hopelessly behind. But he scribbled away
industriously, doing his best. He realized, however, that he had not
quite got the hang of the thing, and at the end of the lecture he turned
to us with most agreeable bashfulness and asked if we would lend him our
notebook, so that he could get down the points that he had missed. We
did so, and briefly explained our own system of abbreviating. We noticed
that in succeeding sessions our royal neighbour did very much better,
learning in some measure to discriminate between what was advisable to
note down and what was mere explanatory matter or persiflage on the part
of the lecturer. But (if we must be candid) we would not recommend him
as a newspaper reporter. And, indeed, the line of work to which he has
been called does not require quite as intense concentration as that of a
cub on what Philip Gibbs calls "The Street of Adventure."
No one could come in contact with the prince without liking him, for his
bashful, gentle, and teachable nature is very winning. We remember with
a certain amusement the time that Grant Robertson got off one of his
annual gags to the effect that, according to the principle of strict
legitimacy, there were in Europe several hundred (we forget the figure)
people with a greater right to the British throne than the family at
present occupying it. The roomful of students roared with genial mirth,
and the unhappy prince blushed in a way that young girls used to in the
good old days of three-piece bathing suits.