least of all by that sister-in-law, the Duchess of Kent, whom he had hated for her starched proprieties, whom he had insulted again and again, and who now, in her palace of Kensington, prepared her daughter Victoria for her entrance upon the sovereignty.

Her Majesty Victoria.

The girl was only eighteen-well taught, discreet, and modest. Greville tells us that she was consumed with blushes when her uncles of Sussex and of Cumberland came, with the royal council, to kneel before her, and to kiss her hand in token of the new allegiance.

The old king had died at two o'clock of the morning; and by eleven o'clock on the same day the duties of royalty had begun for the young queen, in receiving the great officers of state. Among the others she meets on that first regal day in Kensington Palace, are Lansdowne, the fidgety Lord Brougham, the courtly Sir Robert Peel, and the spare, trim-looking old Duke of Wellington, who is charmed by her gracious manner, and by her self-control and dignity. He said he could

not have been more proud of her if she had been his own daughter.

Nearer to the young queen than all these-by old ties of friendship, that always remained unshaken was the suave and accomplished Lord Melbourne First Minister-who has prepared the queen's little speech for her, which she reads with charming self-possession; to him, too, she looks for approval and instruction in all her progress through the new ceremonials of Court, and the ordering of a royal household. And Melbourne is admirably suited to that task; he was not a great statesman; was never an orator, but possessed of all the arts of conciliation - adroit and full of tact, yet kindly, sympathetic, and winning. Not by any means a man beyond reproach in his private life, but bringing to those new offices of political guardianship to the young queen only the soundest good - sense and the wisest of advice- thus inspiring in her a trust that was never forfeited.

Indeed, it was under Melbourne's encouragements, and his stimulative commendation (if stimulus were needed), that the young princess formed

FAMILY OF VICTORIA.

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shortly after that marriage relation which proved altogether a happy one-giving to England and to the world shining proof that righteous domesticities were not altogether clean gone from royal houses. And if the good motherly rulings have not had their best issues with some of the male members of the family, can we not match these wry tendencies with those fastening upon the boys of well-ordered households all around us? It is not in royal circles only that his satanic majesty makes friends of nice boys, when the girls escape him- or seem to!

Well, I have gone back to that old palace of Kensington, which still, with its mossy brick walls, in the west of London, baffles the years, and the fogs - the same palace where we went to find William III. dying, and the gracious Queen Anne too; and where now the Marquis of Lorne and the Princess Louise have their home. I have taken you again there to see how the young Victoria bore herself at the news of her accession with the

great councillors of the kingdom about her — not

alone because those whom we shall bring to the

front, in this closing chapter, have wrought

during her reign; but because, furthermore, she with her household have been encouragers and patrons of both letters and of art in many most helpful ways; and yet, again, because this queen, who has within this twelvemonth (1897) made her new speech to Parliament-sixty years after that first little speech at Kensington-is herself, in virtue of certain modest book-making, to be enrolled with all courtesy in the Guild of Letters. And though the high-stepping critics may be inclined to question the literary judgment or the scrupulous finish of her book-work, we cannot, I think, deny to it a thoroughly humane tone, and a tender realism. We greet her not only by reason of her queenship proper, but for that larger sovereignty of womanhood and of motherhood which she has always dignified and adorned.

I once caught such glimpse of her-as strangers may-in the flush of her early wedded life; not beautiful surely, but comely, kindly, and radiant, in the enjoyment of what is so rare with sovereigns a happy home-life; and again I came upon other sight of her eight years later, when the prince was a rollicking boy, and the princess a

blooming maiden; these and lesser rosy-cheeked ones were taking the air on the terrace at Windsor, almost in the shadow of the great keep, which has frowned there since the days of Edward III.

Macaulay.

In the early days of Queen Victoria's reign when Sir Robert Peel was winning his way to the proud position he later held-when American and English politicians were getting into the toils of the "Maine Boundary " dispute (afterward settled by Ashburton and Webster), and when the Countess of Blessington was making "Gore House " lively with her little suppers, and the banker Rogers entertaining all beaux esprits at his home near the Green Park, there may have been found as guest at one of the banker's famous breakfasts

somewhere we will say in the year 1838 — a man, well-preserved, still under forty- with a shaggy brow, with clothes very likely ill-adjusted and ill-fitting, and with gloves which are never buttoned-who has just come back from India, where he has held lucrative official position. He is cogitating, it is said, a history of England, and