23 AUGUST 1828, Page 10

A cock-and-a-bull story lately circulated among the newspa- pers, setting

forth how the Duchess of Meiningen saved a dis- tinguished individual's life at the launch of the Royal Adelaide. The Morning Post has contradicted the romance, and explained, with extreme circumstantiality, that the Duchess did nothing more than bathe the sides of the launch with a purple flood dis- charged from a quart bottle ! It will be a question for remote posterity, how their ancestors of the nineteenth century contrived to bottle floods ; and it would stagger them not a little to hear, that the very Duchess who let loose this particular purple flood might without impeachment of her delicacy have drank a quarter of it at the dinner table. A quarter of a flood of wine (in the Morning Post phraseology) is a fair matron's allowance.