CHAPTER XV.

FANCY BALL AT COURT.

As a companion picture of the Queen at home at this epoch of her reign, for the lineaments of which we have acknowledged our indebtedness to M. Guizot, we present these recollections of the Queen in her young married days, which we condense from a gossiping work by Lord William Lennox. The Queen had a splendid new ballroom built in Buckingham Palace, and nothing could exceed the brilliancy of the entertainments which she gave there. To one of these, in 1842, Lord Lennox received an invitation. It was abal costumé, the first, he believed, which had ever been given in England by a Prince of the House of Brunswick. A second ball, in which, unlike the former, the dresses were confined to the reigns of George II. and III., was given in the same year. All had to appear in powder—a somewhat trying ordeal to such ladies and gentlemen as did not possess fine features.

A STATE BANQUET AT WINDSOR.

Somewhat about the same time, Lord Lennox dined at Windsor Castle, at the great banquet given on the Ascot Cup day. A magnificent déjeuner had been served for luncheon on the course in Tippoo Sahib’s tent. At the dinner in the evening, the first thing which struck one who was a guest for the first time on such an occasion, was the exact punctuality of the Queen andPrince. Although necessarily fatigued with the bustle and excitement of the day, they were in the drawing-room some minutes before the dinner was announced, and after a courteous greeting to all the guests, proceeded at once to dinner. Another observable peculiarity was that the Prince left the table twenty minutes after the ladies. The banqueting-room on this great occasion was St. George’s Hall, splendid with its ceiling emblazoned with the arms of the Knights of the Garter from the institution of the order, and the portraits of our kings from James I. to George IV. At each end of the hall, buffets, seventeen feet high and forty broad, were set. They were of rich fretted Gothic framework, covered with crimson cloth, and brilliant with massive gold plate. Immediately opposite the Queen was set a pyramid of plate, its apex being the tiger’s head captured at Seringapatam, and comprising the “Iluma” of precious stones which Lord Wellesley, the Governor-General of India, presented to George IV. The table, which was laid for a hundred guests, extended the whole length of the hall. All down the centre, epergnes, vases, cups, and candelabra were ranged, the celebrated St. George’s candelabrum being opposite Her Majesty. The hall was splendidly illuminated, and two bands of the Guards discoursed sweet music from a balcony. The Yeomen of the Guard stood on duty at the entrance. The repast, which did ample justice to the merits of the Queen’s renownedcuisiniér, Francatelli, was entirely served in gold plate, and the attendance was so faultless that there was less bustle and confusion than usually attend a repast shared by a party of ten or a dozen. At a quarter to nine grace was said; and after the dessert and wine had been placedon the table, the Lord Steward rose and proposed, without remark, “The Queen.” The Queen simply, when the toast had been drunk, bowed her acknowledgments. After a brief pause, the health of Prince Albert was drunk standing, as the Queen’s had been, the band playing the “Coburg March.” At half-past nine the Queen rose, and, accompanied by the Duchess of Kent, was followed by all the ladies to the drawing-room. In about twenty minutes all the gentlemen followed. The Waterloo Chamber was thrown open, and its rich historical and pictorial treasures were keenly inspected by groups of the guests. Amongst others of its chief ornaments, attention was concentrated on the swords of the Pretenders James and Charles, Prince Rupert’s coat of mail, and the magnificent shield, by Cellini, presented by Francis I. to King Henry VIII., at the Field of the Cloth of Gold. But the great treat of the evening was the appearance of Madame Rachel, who, with two or three French actors, gavemorceauxfrom her principal impersonations. The success of her performance was the more conspicuous that it was entirely unaided by scenery, dress, or other histrionic accompaniment. A little before twelve the Queen, after addressing with the utmost grace some words of courteous appreciation to the greattragedienne, and bowing to the assembled guests, retired, leaning on her husband’s arm.

THE QUEEN IN SCOTLAND.

Christening of the Prince of Wales—Manufacturing Distress—Queen’s Efforts to alleviate it—Assesses Herself to the Income Tax—Resolves to Visit Scotland—Embarks at Woolwich—Beacon Fires in the Firth of Forth—Landing on Scottish Soil—A Disappointment—Formal Entry into Edinburgh—Richness of Historical and Ancestral Associations—The Queen on the Castle Rock—A Highland Welcome—Departure from Scotland.

The Session of 1842 was opened by the Queen in person with unusual splendour, which was enhanced by the presence of the King of Prussia, who had come over to stand sponsor to the Prince of Wales. The christening was performed on the 25th of January, and was attended with all due magnificence, and succeeded by a splendid banquet. Mr. Raikes, in his amusing, valuable journal, thus records the event:—

Tuesday, 25th.—The day of the Royal christening at Windsor. The Prince of Wales is named Albert Edward. All who have been there say that the scene was very magnificent, and the display of plate at the banquet superb. After the ceremony a silver-embossed vessel containing a whole hogshead of mulled claret was introduced, and served in bucketfuls to the company, who drank the young Prince’s health. Very few ladies were invited.

NATIONAL DISTRESS AND ROYAL SYMPATHY.

The Queen’s speech of this year noticed with deep regret the continued distress in the manufacturing districts of the country, and bore testimony to the exemplary patience and fortitude with which it had been borne.Many people began once more to murmur at the continued flow of gaiety at Windsor where the young parents still seemed to experience the first thrills of transport at the birth of a son and heir. Some of the lowest class of seditious newspapers began the practice of printing in parallel columns the description of the fancy dresses at the Queen’s balls (the purchase and preparation of which must certainly have tended to alleviate the distress), &c., and reports from the pauperised districts, records of deaths from starvation, and the like. Among the unthinking classes such disloyal practices produced a very deep feeling of dissatisfaction. In the course of the year two attempts were reported as having been made upon the Queen’s life: one, however, being merely the freak of an ill-natured boy, but the other was of a much more serious description, and cost its author transportation for life. Sir Robert Peel felt it his duty to discharge the part of a faithful Minister, and to counsel his Royal mistress to lessen the gaieties of the Court, even if it were only in deference to the prejudices of the starving and maddened poor. He neither roused nor augmented her fears, but gave her the counsel which the time required. The Queen at once acted, and without taking offence, upon the Minister’s advice. At the christening of the Prince of Wales all the ladies of the Court appeared in Paisley shawls, English lace, and other articles of home manufacture. And when the christening was over a marked sobriety settled down over the Court, and continued during all the summer of 1842. Even the most querulous speedily granted that they had no reason to complain.

This change in the sentiments of the public, especially its lower and more distressed portions, was promoted andaccelerated by an act, equally tasteful and touching, of Her Majesty during this year. In the spring of 1842, Sir Robert Peel, now thoroughly warm in his seat as Premier, commanding a large working majority, and not yet having awakened the hostility of the decidedly Protectionist section of his followers, inaugurated that splendid series of bravely devised measures in the direction of Free Trade, of which the great Anti-Corn Law Act of four years later was, so far as he was concerned, the culmination. In 1842, Peel proposed and carried a Budget which considerably lessened the burden of Customs imposts, but the chief merit and recommendation of which consisted in the fact that it relieved the nation of the incubus of a host of very galling excise duties on such articles of common use as glass, leather, bricks, and soap. These beneficial remissions of taxation could not have been effected by him—for they entailed a heavy cost upon the revenue, already inadequate to meet the annual expenditure—but for the re-imposition of an Income Tax, a means of raising revenue which had been long disused, to the extent of sevenpence in the pound on all incomes above £150 of annual value. This, of course, did not affect the allowance made to the Sovereign. Nevertheless, Her Majesty evinced her sympathy at once with the prevailing distress and with the daring fiscal expedient of the Premier, by coming forward unsolicited to offer to receive an abatement of her income, based upon the precise scale of that imposed by Parliament upon her subjects.

Up to the Queen’s reign, the members of the House of Brunswick had never been peripatetic in their tendencies. The first two Georges had made frequent visits to theirpatrimonial German electorate, but they evinced no desire to visit England beyond the immediate environs of London. George III. never passed out of England; George IV. visited Ireland and Scotland each on one occasion; but with these exceptions, hardly any British highways were traversed by his wheels during his reign, whether as Sovereign Regent or Regnant, except the great roads connecting his capital with Windsor, Brighton, and Newmarket. William IV. was too old when he came to the throne to make it at all probable that he would evince any taste to visit any of the outlying portions of his dominions; nor did he do so. Queen Victoria, as we have copiously seen in earlier chapters, was from her very infancy habituated to moving about from place to place, and all along she has proved herself as proud as Queen Elizabeth herself of mingling with and showing herself to her people.

FIRST VISIT TO SCOTLAND.

For some time the Queen was understood to have contemplated a journey to the land of those Stuart ancestors by virtue of whose Tudor blood they, and the Brunswick line through them, and she through it, inherited the British crown. In the autumn of this year all seemed propitious for the journey, and it was undertaken accordingly by herself and her young husband. Their first destination was the Scottish capital, and as the railway system connecting the southern and northern extremities of the island was yet far from complete, the journey was made by water from the Thames to the Forth, the port of embarkation being Woolwich, and of debarkation, Granton, a minor harbour in the immediate neighbourhood of Edinburgh.

The expected visit was awaited and prepared for inthe North with the utmost eagerness of expectancy. Half Scotland seemed to have emptied itself into the metropolis to do her honour. In their preparations, burgher vied with noble, tartan-clad Highlanders with Lowlanders in their more sombre blue bonnets and hodden grey. On the 29th of August, the Queen left Windsor, and proceeded to Woolwich, where she embarked amid the acclamations of her metropolitan and Kentish subjects at an early hour of the same day. In a Royal yacht, towed by a steam ship of war, the voyage was safely effected in the fine weather and on the placid wave of early autumn. In due time the Royal squadron arrived off Dunbar, which, with the Bass Rock and Tantallon Castle, form together a finecoup-d’œilof romantic coast scenery and middle age antiquity, at the mouth of the Firth of Forth. Here it was met by large steamers filled by welcomers from Edinburgh and its neighbourhood, who greeted their illustrious visitors with loud huzzahs, and the strains of that National Anthem, which, though of English birth, was chaunted right lustily by Scottish lungs and lips. It was observed that Her Majesty, who came on board and acknowledged the vivas of her subjects, had paid the Scots the compliment of enveloping herself in a Paisley shawl; and when, a day or two later, she made her formal entry past the church sanctified by the preaching of John Knox, to the Castle, in a narrow chamber of which her unfortunate ancestor Queen Mary bore her son King James, she wore, with even more conspicuously appropriate taste, a shawl of Stuart tartan.

LANDING ON SCOTTISH SOIL.

As she passed up the Firth, under cover of the gathering night, every peak on either side of the estuary, fromSt. Abb’s Head, which she had left behind, away westwards to the Pentlands, the Lomonds, and the Ochils, was surmounted by a blazing beacon—a splendid sight, and stimulative by contrast to the imaginations of those who recollected to what different uses beacon-fires on Scottish hills and Scottish Border Keeps had been put in earlier days of the international relations of England and Scotland. The fiery welcome was returned from the Royal yacht, by the letting off of rockets, and the burning of blue lights.

At last the squadron came in sight in the roads before Leith, the anchor being let down—“a welcome sound,” wrote the Queen—at a quarter to one o’clock on the morning of Thursday, September the 1st. Every one of the heights on or under the domination of which Edinburgh stands, had been crowded all the previous day with tens of thousands of spectators. All at once two guns from the castle, and a signal flag hoisted from the summit of Nelson’s column, some 400 feet above the level of the sea, announced the arrival. The Queen slept and rested herself after the fatigues of her voyage on board the Royal yacht; and she took her good but inalert subjects by surprise, by effecting her landing at an hour so early on the succeeding morning, that many of them, wearied by their recent vigils, had not yet left their couches, and even the corporate dignitaries were subject to the mortification of not having the honour to receive and welcome their Queen as her foot first touched Scottish soil. In their absence, that pleasurable duty was discharged by Sir Robert Peel, and the Duke of Buccleuch, whose guest she was about to be at his palace of Dalkeith, and who had ridden immediately afterher carriage, as Captain-General of her body-guard of Scottish Archers, on the day on which she was crowned queen at Westminster. Sir Robert Peel told the Queen that the people were all in the highest glee and good humour, though a little disappointed at the non-arrival of the squadron the day before, as had been expected.

With the extraordinarily auspicious fatality which has made “Queen’s weather” so trite and proverbial an expression, the sun splendidly burst forth at the moment of her landing, and continued to shine throughout her progress through a portion of the New Town of Edinburgh; its bright freestone streets and terraces sparkling in the clear, sunlit air—past her ancient Palace of Holyrood, and so through fertile Lothian to the mansion of the princely head of the old Border House of the Scotts. When the customary ensign was hauled down from the top of the rugged Castle Rock, and the Royal Standard was hoisted in its place, the streets at once filled, and the loyal shouts of the crowds, who hastily assembled in no small force, sufficiently atoned for the absence of those whom the somewhat unexpected arrival balked for this one day of the delight of expressing their devotion.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF SCOTLAND.

The impression which her first view of Edinburgh made upon the Queen was very striking and most favourable. She thought it “beautiful, totally unlike anything else she had seen.” Even Prince Albert, a great traveller while yet in his teens, and who had visited very many great and renowned cities, also said it was unlike anything which he had witnessed. The massive stone buildings, with not a solitary brick used in theirconstruction; the great dorsal fin of the High Street; the magnificent situation of the Castle; the Calton Hill, guarded by mediæval battlements and crowned by Choragic temples, with the noble back-ground of Arthur’s Seat overtopping the whole, together impressed the youthful tourists as “forming altogether a splendid spectacle.”

As the carriages drove through the city, the Earl of Wemyss, who marched by the Queen’s side in his green uniform of a Scottish Archer of the Guard, pointed out to Her Majesty the varied objects of interest on the line of route through the eastern portions of the city to the Duke of Buccleuch’s palace of Dalkeith. When they got into the open country, she was further astonished to find that not only all the cottages, but even the fences dividing field from field, were also built of stone. The peasants by the wayside were equally objects of curiosity and interest, as they had “quite a different character from England and the English.” The close caps—Scottice, “mutches”—of the old women, and the long, flowing hair, frequently red, of the handsome girls and children, were equal novelties to the royal “Southrons.” The Prince was struck with the resemblance of the country people to Germans. Other Scottish specialties appeared at the breakfast-table at Dalkeith, in the form of oatmeal porridge and “Finnan Haddies”—the first of which, at least, found immediate favour with Her Majesty.

The grand ceremonial of entering the ancient city in state was reserved for the Saturday after the arrival; the interval having been devoted by the royal party to quiet and repose in the magnificent domain ofBuccleuch, and drives to objects of interest in its neighbourhood. The line of the cavalcade, on this red-letter day, was up the steep ascent of the Canongate, High Street, and Lawnmarket, from the Palace of Holyrood (which the Queen rightly pronounced “a royal-looking old place”) to the Castle which the Black Douglas scaled, where George Buchanan’s pedantic Stuart pupil was born, and from the parapets of which various and shifting prospects are to be descried, which may be equalled, but cannot be surpassed, in any portion of Her Majesty’s dominions.

THE QUEEN IN EDINBURGH CASTLE.

It was indeed historic ground along which the Queen passed this day. Every one of the stupendous houses of eight, ten, or even more stories, which formed a mighty avenue of stone on either side of the ancient causeway along which the steeds which drew her carriage slowly and deliberately proceeded, had some tale of long gone days to tell, many of them being most intimately associated with the fortunes of her Stuart ancestors. On her way she passed the site of that tower in which Darnley, her ancestor, was blown into eternity. Ere she left her Palace of Holyrood and the adjacent ruins of the abbey which was erected by that Scottish king who built and endowed so many abbeys that his subjects piteously exclaimed that he was a “saur saunt for the Croon,” she may have seen the blood-stains of Rizzio, and the somewhat mythical portraits of the Kings of the Houses of Kenneth, Bruce, and the Stuarts. On one side of her was the old mansion of the Regent Moray, on the other the spot where, for the first and only time, the boy Francis Jeffrey set eyes upon Robert Burns. Here was theancient oaken hall where the Scottish Parliament sate, there the office of that Scottish journal of which Daniel Defoe, the staunch and loyal friend of William III., was the first editor. Here was the house in which John Knox lived and died, there the church in which he preached with such fervour for that Protestant faith, with the establishment of which in Europe both lines of her ancestors were so intimately identified. And when she arrived on the esplanade of the Castle itself, she could look across the Forth on the one side to the minor mountain which casts its morning shadow into Loch Leven, from her captivity on an islet of which Scottish Catholic gentlemen so gallantly rescued her Stuart ancestress; while immediately beneath her lay the Grassmarket—at once the Tower and the Smithfield of Scotland—where Montrose and Argyll expiated respectively their loyalty to the Stuart race, and to freedom of soul and speech.

As the cortège passed up the streets along which Prince Charlie had passed when he held court at Holyrood just ninety-seven years before, as she received at the site of the old Tolbooth the keys of the city from the Lord Provost, bending the knee beside his fellow-burghers, clad in the old costumes of the Trades, and close beside a guard of honour of Highlanders headed by the present Duke of Argyll; or as she stood surveying from the topmost battery of the citadel her fair ancestral domains of Lothian and Fife, and the distant mountains which tower o’er Loch Lomond and the Trossachs, some such proud and pathetic recollections as these must have occupied and touched the heart of theyoungest and the mightiest monarch in Europe. Their closer acquaintance with Edinburgh increased the mingled amazement and delight of the Queen and Prince. Prince Albert pronounced the view of it from the margin of the Firth of Forth as “fairy-like,” “what you would imagine as a thing to dream of, or to see in a picture.” He said he felt sure the Acropolis could not be finer, and the Queen at once recognised the appropriateness of the idealised metamorphosis of “Auld Reekie” (Anglice, “Old Smoky”) into “the Modern Athens.” The Leith ticket-porters, mounted on flower-decked horses, with broad, ribbon-decorated Kilmarnock bonnets, and the pretty Newhaven fishwives, with their clear, peachy complexions and Danish costumes, were objects of peculiar interest.

THE QUEEN IN THE HIGHLANDS.

Space fails us to enter into details of the further incidents of this, the Queen’s first visit to her Scottish dominion. Enough to say that she received in the Highlands, where she visited in succession not a few of her oldest nobles of Gaelic and Norman descent, receptions as rapturous as that which she experienced in the Modern Athens. The welcome, if it could not be more hearty, was at least attended with more picturesque accessories in the romantic region where the dialect and the “garb of Old Gael” still to a large extent prevail. At Dupplin Castle, at Scone Palace, where her ancestors were crowned, at Blair Athole, at Taymouth, and at Drummond Castle, she was entertained with equal splendour, and with the true and special elements of “Highland Welcome.” She may be almost said to have passed through a continuous succession oftriumphal arches. Every chieftain brought out all his available clansmen, all in kilts, claymores, and Glengarry bonnets, to act as guards of honour. Balls, in which the national dances, performed by the best born cadets of the noble houses of whom she was the guest, constituted the chief feature, alternated with deer-stalking, for the especial behoof of the Prince; processions of boats on the lake through which rolls the Tay, a river only less rapid than the Spey; and visits to places of historic interest or romantic beauty.

The Queen was especially charmed with the beautiful situation of the ancient city of Perth, and the enthusiastic reception which the multitudes there assembled gave to her. Prince Albert, too, was delighted, and likened the appearance of the place to Basle. At Scone Palace, which is within two miles of Perth, a very natural object of peculiar interest was the mound on which all the Scottish kings had been crowned. At Dunkeld the Highlands were fairly entered; and here the Royal party were met and escorted by a guard of Athole Highlanders, armed with halberts, and headed by a piper. One of them danced the sword dance, with which the travellers were greatly amused, and others of them figured in a reel.

The longest sojourn made in the Highlands was at Taymouth, the seat of the Marquis of Breadalbane. The scenery here again revived recollections of Switzerland in the memory of Prince Albert, who was particularly prone, in this and subsequent visits to the North, to trace resemblances between its scenery and localities which he had visited in the tours of his bachelor days.The reception at Taymouth was magnificent, and quite captivated the illustrious guests. The Queen wrote in her journal—

Thecoup d’œilwas indescribable. There were a number of Lord Breadalbane’s Highlanders, all in the Campbell tartan, drawn up in front of the house, with Lord Breadalbane himself in a Highland dress at their head; a few of Sir Niel Menzies’ men (in the Menzies red and white tartan), a number of pipers playing, and a company of the 92nd Highlanders, also in kilts. The firing of the guns, the cheering of the great crowd, the picturesqueness of the dresses, the beauty of the surrounding country, with its rich back-ground of wooded hills, altogether formed one of the finest scenes imaginable. It seemed as if a great chieftain in olden feudal times was receiving his Sovereign. It was princely and romantic.

Wherever the Queen rambled during her stay by the shores of Loch Tay, she was guarded by two Highlanders, and it recalled to her mind “olden times, to see them with their swords drawn.” Walking one day with the Duchess of Norfolk, the Queen and her noble companion met “a fat, good-humoured little woman.” She cut some flowers for the ladies, and the Duchess handed to her some money, saying, “From Her Majesty.” The poor woman was perfectly astounded, but, recovering her wits, came up to the Queen, and said naïvely that “her people were delighted to see the Queen in Scotland.” Wherever the royal visitors were, or went, the inevitable strains of the bagpipes were heard. They played before the Castle at frequent intervals throughout the day, from breakfast till dinner-time, and invariably when they went in or out of doors. When rowed in boats on the lake, two pipers sat in the bows and played; and the Queen, who had grown “quite fond” of the bagpipes,was reminded of the lines of Scott, with whose poems she had, from an early age, possessed the most intimate familiarity:—

“See the proud pipers in the bow,And mark the gaudy streamers flowFrom their loud chambers down, and sweepThe furrow’d bosom of the deep,As, rushing through the lake amain,They plied the ancient Highland strain.”

DEPARTURE FROM SCOTLAND.

On the 13th of September the return journey from the Highlands by Stirling, the ancient Castle of which was visited, to Dalkeith Palace, had been completed. Two days later the Queen and Prince re-embarked at Granton,en routefor Woolwich and Windsor.

Although a by no means excessive quantity of time—but a fortnight—was consumed in the tour, some idea of the rapidity with which distances were traversed, and the extent of ground covered, may be gathered from the fact that no fewer than 656 post-horses were employed. The Queen touched the hearts of the Highlanders—among whom Jacobitism remained, not as an element of personal devotion to a fallen house, but not the less as a deep chord of pathos and poetry—by commanding a Scottish vocalist, at a concert given in her honour at Blair Athole, to sing two of the most beloved of Jacobite songs—“Cam’ ye by Athole,” and “Wae’s me for Prince Charlie.” When she once more embarked at Granton on her homeward route, she left memories of pleasure and affection which far exceeded the intensely ardent excitement which had preceded and greeted her landing. On the last day which she spent in Scotland, the Queenwrote in her journal—“This is our last day in Scotland; it is really a delightful country, and I am very sorry to leave it.” And the day after, watching its vanishing coast—“As the fair shores of Scotland receded more and more from our view, we felt quite sad that this very pleasant and interesting tour was over; but we shall never forget it.”

WHAT ENGLAND OWES TO PRINCE ALBERT.

The Prince’s Study of our Laws and Constitution—Two Misconceptions Outlived—His Versatility—First Speech an Anti-Slavery One—His Appreciation and Judicious Criticism of Art—Scientific Side of his Mind—As an Agriculturist.

It will not be undesirable at this stage of our narrative to interpose a summary compendium of some indications of the manner in which Prince Albert, or the “Prince Consort,” as he was designated by Royal Letters Patent, after 1857, discharged the high, onerous, and important duties to which his position called him. If the conduct and career of a husband be an integral and large part of a woman’s life, it is tenfold more so in the case of a woman who is also a queen, and especially a queen-regnant in and by her own right. The large and enlarging breadth of mind which the Prince soon began to display; the abundant tenderness of heart, which found at once indication and exercise in the admirable and diverse modes in which he advanced all agencies of public utility and associated benevolence; the excellent mode in which, equally as a father and a husband, he evinced the warm glow of domestic virtue which animated his bosom, and the absolute and much-wanted scientific and artistic lessons which he taught more than any other man, during his life in England, to the somewhat uncouth people of whom he became a part—all these, and other elementsof character and conduct, indirectly increased the growing esteem in which the Queen was held, on her own merits, by her people; for we might have had to look forward to a different national future, so far as a national future can be moulded in the sense of either making or marring, had the “father of our future kings” been other and lesser than what he was. Such a man as the Prince Consort must necessarily have wielded a very large and weighty influence upon the character of the royal lady whom he married. The history of her life, therefore, even if it were traced within narrower limits than those within whose compression our task must be discharged, would be insufficiently delineated without the introduction of such episodical but most relevant matter as that to which this chapter is briefly dedicated.

Almost the first task which the Prince Consort undertook when he came amongst us was to set himself to an assiduous study of our laws and institutions. He secured the services of a most competent instructor in themes so important to one who stood so near the throne, in the person of the late Mr. William Selwyn, Q.C. Mr. Selwyn was a sound jurist, and under his guidance the Prince read such works as Blackstone, De Lolme, Hallam, Bentham, and Mill. He proved himself an apt student, for he had the capacity for study eminently developed; and, besides, his position was one of singular difficulty and delicacy. He stood so near to the throne, amongst a people, too, traditionally jealous of aliens, and especially of aliens in high places, that any utterance he might be called upon to make would be considered as almost, if not quite, emanating from the throne itself. Although a certain cabinet intrigue, and one rare expression of his own—notso much unguarded in itself, as wanting in explicitness, and capable of a certain misconstruction—did, on two several occasions, provoke in certain quarters something approaching to national disfavour, he soon outlived the misconception; and the universal sentiment of the people came round to the conviction that the Prince was faithful and loyal to the constitution to which he had sworn fidelity; nay more, that he had fairly caught, apprehended, and absorbed into his being the very genius and spirit of the English race.

PRINCE ALBERT S FIRST SPEECH.

The first speech the Prince made in England was at an anti-slavery meeting; the last at the opening of an international statistical congress. The former was delivered during the first summer of his married life. It is so brief, and it gives, as it were, so thoroughly the key-note of his character, that our readers will thank us for giving it entire:—

I have been induced to preside at the meeting of this society from a conviction of its paramount importance to the great interests of humanity and justice. I deeply regret that the benevolent and persevering exertions of England to abolish that atrocious traffic in human beings (at once the desolation of Africa and the blackest stain upon civilised Europe) have not as yet led to any satisfactory conclusion. But I sincerely trust that this great country will not relax in its efforts until it has finally, and for ever, put an end to a state of things so repugnant to the spirit of Christianity and the best feelings of our nature. Let us, therefore, trust that Providence will prosper our exertions in so holy a cause, and that (under the auspices of our Queen and her Government) we may, at no distant period, be rewarded by the accomplishment of the great and humane object for the promotion of which we have this day met.

We have already remarked the wide range of Prince Albert’s endeavours, study, devotion, and consequent usefulness. He presided at dinners of the Literary Fund, andof the Royal Academy; at the Trinity House most frequently, and at many agricultural meetings. Two of the best and most pregnant with good of his addresses, were delivered at the meetings of associations designed respectively for the better housing of labourers, and in behalf of the large and sorely tempted class of domestic servants. Now he presided at the Bicentenary of the Corporation of the Sons of the Clergy; again at the two hundredth anniversary of one of our most illustrious regiments of Foot Guards. On art, as all were prepared to expect, he delivered ripe words of wisdom at the Royal Academy in Trafalgar Square, and in laying the foundation in the capital of his wife’s Stuart ancestors of a new National Gallery for her Scottish subjects. Against the expectation, and to the loudly expressed surprise of all, save those who knew him thoroughly, he made a most admirable survey of the sciences and their uses, at one of the last meetings held ere his death, of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Of art he was a judicious critic, as well as a munificent patron. It was at his special wish and option that thesavantLyon Playfair was made one of his Equerries; and that a residence in Hampton Court Palace was put at the disposal of Michael Faraday.

How much of mingled love for art and artists, and at the same time of criticism most kindly and sagacious, is to be found in these brief sentences, extracted from his great speech at the Royal Academy dinner:—

An unkind word of criticism passes like a cold blast over their tender shoots, and shrivels them up, checking the flow of the sap, which was rising to produce, perhaps, multitudes of flowers and fruits. But still criticism is absolutely necessary to the development of art,and the injudicious praise of an inferior work becomes an insult to superior genius. In this respect, our times are peculiarly favourable when compared with those when Madonnas were painted in the seclusion of convents; for we have now on the one hand the eager competition of a vast array of artists of every degree of talent and skill, and on the other, as judge, a great public, for the greater part wholly uneducated in art, and thus led by professional writers who often strive to impress the public with a great idea of their own artistic knowledge, by the merciless manner in which they treat works which cost those who produced them the highest efforts of mind or feeling.

And again, as a companion and worthy picture—which is none the less, but all the more, worthy of hanging along with that we have just presented, that the great truth it teaches is presented with such lucid simplicity—take these sentences explanatory of the scope and end of such institutions as the British Association for the Advancement of Science, delivered by him as its President, at the 1859 Congress at Aberdeen:—

THE PRINCE’S EULOGY ON HUMBOLDT.

If the activity of this Association ever found, or could find its personification in one individual—its incarnation as it were—this had been found in that distinguished and revered philosopher who has been removed from amongst us in his ninetieth year, within the last few months. Alexander Von Humboldt ever strove after dominion over that universality of human knowledge which stands in need of thoughtful government and direction to preserve its integrity. He strove to tie up the fasces of scientific knowledge, to give them strength in unity. He treated all scientific men as members of one family, enthusiastically directing, fostering, and encouraging inquiry, where he saw either the want of or the willingness for it. His protection of the young and ardent student led many to success in their pursuits. His personal influence with the courts and governments of most countries in Europe, enabled him to plead the cause of science in a manner which made it more difficult to refuse than to grant what he requested. All lovers of Science deeply mourn for the loss of such a man. Gentlemen, it is a singular coincidence, that this very day on which we are here assembled, and are thus giving expression to our admiration of him, should be the anniversary of his birth.

The Queen, who was staying at Balmoral, was very anxious about the manner in which her husband should pass the very severe ordeal of delivering an address to the assembled men of science. She recorded her high gratification at learning by telegram that “Albert’s reception was admirable, and that all was going off as well as possible. Thank God!” She invited thesavans, to a fête at her Highland home; they accepted the invitation in great numbers; and “the philosophers,” of whom Her Majesty was not a little, and rather comically, afraid, were not only entertained with creature comforts, but the somewhat novel combination was presented of Owen, Brewster, Sabine, and Murchison, with their brethren of lesser renown, standing as spectators of contests of strength between athletes of the Grant, Farquharson, Duff, and other clans. Some of the more distinguished guests remained over night, and at dinner they rejoiced the Queen’s heart by “speaking in very high terms of my beloved Albert’s speech, the good it had done, and the general satisfaction it had caused.”

THE PRINCE AS AN AGRICULTURIST.

Probably the capacity of all others in which the Prince became most generally familiar to the nation, was that of a practical, improving, scientific agriculturist; and we use this word in its twofold sense, as embracing the growing of crops and the rearing of live stock. Almost from the outset of his career amongst us he commenced a series of scientific agricultural experiments on the farms in Windsor Park. He renovated the agriculture of the Park, as much as he confessedly did its landscape gardening. He became a constant and most successful exhibitor of live domestic edible animals at the great agricultural shows; his example in this field having been followedsince his death, to the great gratification of the agricultural interest, both by his widow and his eldest son; and, especially in the case of Her Majesty, with marked success. As a high and eminent authority on the subject has admirably put it—

His was no merely idle, passing patronage or casual aid, but it was rather a pursuit he delighted in, and one he followed out with equal energy and advantage. The most practical man could not go that pleasant round from the Flemish farm to the Norfolk, and so back again by the Home and the Dairy, without learning something wherever he went.

We must deny ourselves the pleasure of aught but passing reference to the admirable manner in which he discharged his academic duties as Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, which post he held from 1845 till his death, and about which we say enough when we remind or inform the reader that it was such men as Professor Sedgwick, the Vice-chancellor, who spoke of the exercise of his duties in this capacity in terms of the highest honour and estimation. Similar were his services to such noble institutions as Eton and Wellington Colleges, in both of which he offered prizes expressly calculated to encourage the pursuit of those studies which had been, or were most likely to be, ignored in their several cases. Horticulture, art exhibitions, the National Portrait Gallery, the Society of Arts, societies for improving the general condition and the housing of the labouring classes, mechanics’ institutions—each of these constitutes a theme most pregnant and suggestive in connection with the Prince’s name and memory. But we can do no more than recite and dismiss the bald catalogue of topics. Reserving for the appropriate chronological occasion somebrief remarks upon the character of the Prince as a private man, as contrasted with his aspects of character as a citizen and public benefactor, to which we have at present confined ourselves, we feel that we cannot better conclude than by condensing his opinions delivered in an address to the annual meeting of the Servants’ Provident Benevolent Society, in 1849, in which the whole plan and doctrine by which he believed all really useful associated benevolence ought to be regulated was summed up. His view was that no such organisation was founded upon a right principle which did not require every man, by personal exertion, and by his own choice, to work out his own happiness. Benevolence he held to be not really such unless it stimulated providence, self-denial, and perseverance. He used special words of warning against those so frequent lotteries of uncertain and precarious advantages—“really a species of gambling”—expensive convivial meetings, balloting for prizes, and electioneering contests on a small scale. “Let them always bear in mind,” he proceeded to say, “that their savings are capital, that capital will only return a certain interest, and that any advantage offered beyond that interest has to be purchased at a commensurate risk of the capital itself.”

Such is a view, but all too summary and inadequate, of some of the obligations which the English, as his fellow-citizens, owed to that Prince whose life was so intertwined with and influential on that of their Sovereign.

FOREIGN TRAVEL AND HOME VISITS.

Visit to King Louis Philippe at Eu—A Loyal Corporation—Splendid Reception of the Queen in France—Anecdote of the Queen’s Regard for Prince Albert—Visit of the Czar Nicholas—Home Life in Scotland—Visit to Germany—Illuminations of the Rhine—A Rural Fête at Coburg.

In August, 1843, the Queen and Prince Albert made a yachting excursion round portions of the south coast and the Isle of Wight. Thence they steamed over to Treport, on the French coast, the nearest port to the Chateau d’Eu, a rural residence of Louis Philippe. On the arrival of the Queen and Prince from Windsor at Southampton, they were met at the end of the pier by the Duke of Wellington and other noble and official personages. It rained heavily, and as there was not sufficient covering for the stage intended to run on to the yachtVictoria and Albert, the members of the Corporation, like so many Raleighs, stripped off their red gowns in a moment, and the pathway was covered for Her Majesty’s use, so that Queen Victoria, like Queen Elizabeth, walked dry-footed to her vessel. The undergraduates at Cambridge acted precisely similarly on the occasion of a visit in wet weather by the Queen and Prince to that university in this year.

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