V. THE QUEEN AS DOMESTIC EXEMPLAR.

ER MAJESTY is a Queen, ay, every inch a Queen. But before she was a

Queen she was a woman. Her reign as Sovereign has been protracted beyond the longest reign of English monarchs; but her sixty years of sovereignty fall short of her seventy-eight years of womanhood. As sixty is to seventyeight, so is-no, the rule of three does not apply. For there is no comparison. Victoria as Woman is o immeasurably more important to the majority of her subjects than Her Majesty the Queen and Empress, that no arithmetical comparison can express the difference.

The reason is obvious. Among the four hundred million subjects of the Queen of Britain and Empress of India there may be, perhaps it is an outside allowance—four millions who have any adequate idea of the real every-day work of our Sovereign Lady the Queen. It is probably nearer the mark to say that only four hundred thousand persons, at the very utmost, have even an elementary conception of the part which she has played as Monarch in the modern State. Of those who really understand how diligent and useful the Queen has been all these sixty years of her reign as Ruler and Sovereign, as inspirer of Imperial policies, and as peacemaker and general manager in last resort of all great controversies, it is doubtful whether there are four thousand all told. I have some means of gauging this by the bewildered amazement and blank incredulous denials which have been evoked by the four preceding articles of this series. We never knew, say my readers-we had no idea before that the Queen really counted for so much in the State. The evidence that she has inspired great Colonial and Indian policies, that she has prevented wars and averted great crises-all these things, even after sixty years, are practically unknown to the vast majority of her subjects. To display the real workings of the Monarchy in the modern State, to unveil the secret influence of the Sovereign in our Democratic age, has been a veritable revelation to thousands-a revelation the authenticity of which even now is frankly questioned by many of those who ought to know better. But while only four thousand, or at the outside four millions, appreciate the Queen as Sovereign, there is not one among all the four hundred millions who is not more or less qualified to appreciate the Woman who, for sixty years, has been the foremost figure in the greatest Empire in the world.

We are all of woman born, and one-half of us are born women. Every one of us worshipped a woman in the days when in earliest infancy mother was to us the soul Incarnation of all the Gods-the Love of Heaven come down to earth for our exclusive benefit. Of the moiety of the race who attain man's estate, hardly one but has worshipped some other woman, and most of us more than one. As maiden, daughter, sister, bride, mother, aunt, grandmother and widow, there is none of us so utterly forlorn and orphaned by destiny but has at one time or another had practical personal experience of the Angel in the House. She has either fascinated us with her charm, ministered to us with her love, soothed us with her sympathy, awed us by her resignation, or if she has done none of these things she has in some miraculous fashion by her very failures and imperfections made more vivid and more adorable the ideal woman which she, alas! was not. Hence there is not one of us but feels that he is more or less competent to appreciate, to understand, or to criticise the Queen regarded from the point of view of her womanhood. We all of us obey the poet's injunc

tion to the Prince Consort on his wedding-day, when she charged him by his poet mind :

"Which not by glory or degree takes measure of mankind,

Esteem that wedded hand less dear for sceptre than for ring,

And hold her uncrowned womanhood to be the royal thing."

Into affairs of State, the complexities of treaties, the mysteries of diplomacy, and the intrigues of factions, the majority of people never enter. But we all have to live our lives and to make our homes, and it is because the Queen has lived her life and made her home for sixty years before the gaze of all her subjects who were doing the same thing in their cottages and villas, that she is known and loved and revered throughout the world.

Whatever may be said against Monarchy, this supreme service it renders to society. It substitutes for the person of a President, who may be soldier or politician, but who is always an individual and invariably a man, the spectacle of a Family, always composed of men and women, and sometimes, as in the present instance, presided over by a woman. Everything that takes us out of ourselves and excites human sympathy for others makes

PRINCESS VICTORIA IN 1836. (After a drawing by F. IV. Wilkin.)

PRINCESS VICTORIA IN 1835.
(From a miniature by H. Collen.)

for righteousness.

Even the gossip of the village taproom and of the society paper is not without its uses. It links us with our kind, testifies to the reality of relationship, makes us in a real sense our brother's keeper, and helps us to realise that we are all neighbours one of another. Of all agencies devised by the ingenuity of man, nothing exceeds the Monarchy for stimulating interest in another family besides our own. The Royal Family is the only family besides our own into all the intimacies of which we are permitted to gaze. The naturalists who study bees in a glass hive fina an absorbing interest even in the drones, providing they are under constant observation. In the Royal hive our Queen Bee lives always under glass. She is everybody's neighbour. The prayer for the Queen and all the Royal Family is a constant reproof of the selfish, exclusive anxiety for our own families which found such apt expression in the familiar litany of the north country pitman:

"O Lord, bless me and my wife,

Our Jack and his wife,

Us four, and no more,

For His mercy's sake. Amen."

The constant presence of the Family humanises all our life. Love-making forces its way into attention as a matter of equal importance with party intrigues, and an

approaching confine

Be

Cabinet councils.
the cradle, and the bier
in the history of the
linked to year by one
riages and christen-
coronation occurs once
pageants are rare; but
maternal care, they

or by night; and in
rows, the responsi-
tations of domestic
share alike. Hence
Exemplar is far more
Queen as Empire
Sovereign, or the
Church. For the
versal of all Empires,
all Kingdoms, and the
of all Churches. And
thunder-peal of noisy
and the fierce agita-
has become but an
interest, the memory
the Mother, and the

ment claims priority to fore the marriage altar, all men are equal; and Royal Family year is long round of marings and funerals. A in a reign, and State the wifely duty, the intermit not by day

the joys and the sorbilities and the templife, we all share and the Queen as Domestic important than the Builder, the Queen as Queen as Head of the Family is the most unithe most important of original germ and cell long after all the war has died away tion of political crises object of antiquarian of Victoria the Wife, Widow will continue

to sustain and inspire innumerable families that are and that are yet to be.

I.-BRIDE.

Queen Victoria may fairly challenge comparison with Queen Elizabeth in Statesmanship and in Sovereignty. But in this higher region into which we are now entering there is no comparison. Elizabeth, however brilliant her Court, however numerous and devoted her suitors, lived and reigned and died alone. Jealousy she knew, and

love. But

was never hers. Unwedded she lived, childless she died, a splendid star, shining alone in the firmament, severed by that fact from the sacred communion of the joy and the sorrows of the children of men.

How different it has been with Queen Victoria! In her own long life she has almost exhausted the sum of the experiences of womankind. She has never known the anguish of unrequited love, the madness of jealousy, or the stony despair that deadens the heart of the deserted wife. Her wifehood while it lasted was quite ideal. Not to many, only to the rare few, is given to realise such perfect blessedness as the Queen found in her marriage. But to have it realised once, so completely and so ideally, in a family that lived under the fierce light beating upon the Throne has been as a benediction from the gods to all English-speaking men. What has been once may be again. The height which one wedded pair attained marks the level which the whole race may yet attain, and when that goal is gained mankind will indeed stand

near to the portals of Paradise. In that perfect union of two in one we see the -bright consummate flower" of the race, and in its fragrance and in its beauty, in its radiance and its charm, even those less favoured may renew their withered hopes and re-illumine their flickering faith. For they solved the well-nigh insoluble problem of life, these two, between whom was such perfect sympathy and understanding, that, in their home, disputes were unknown,

How was it done? What were the elements in this pertect union? Courts, and especially the English Court from the time of Charles the Second downwards, are not pre-eminently calculated to be the forcing-house of marital felicity. The answers to these questions, if so be they can be answered truly, would be the most important contribution of the Record Reign to the science of the conduct of life.

There was love of course to begin with, and to end with. That is as obvious and as necessary as that there must be air to breathe. For love is the vital breath of true marriage, without which it is only a desolate and barren wilderness in which groweth wormwood. But every one imagines they are in love before they marry. Nothing is so confidently believed in, so passionately asserted, in the first heyday of youthful emotion; and how often it takes to itself wings and flies away! Passionate protestations of intensity of feeling are no tests of love. There is only one test, and that is continuity, for every day brings its own test, and the more days the more tests. The love that lasts is the only love worth calling love; but in the nature of things no one can know if his or hers has the staying quality until it has stayed the course. Mere passion, born chiefly of sex attraction, is as evanescent as the flowers in spring. Without such florescence there would be no fruitage; but with many marriage is like an apple-tree, smothered in blossom in April, but with never an apple in September. Hence, in seeking to discover why the Queen's wedded life was so different from that of the majority of her subjects, while we must postulate love as a matter of course, we find the same postulate at the beginning of most marriages, even those which terminate unhappily; so that postulate helps us little in the object of our quest. We must look elsewhere for the clue to the secret. The circumstances of the marriage, examined as we would examine the environment of a particularly fine specimen of some rare plant, are conspicuous enough.

First, they were almost exactly the same age. Secondly, they were married when very young. The Queen as bride was just over, the bridegroom just under, twentyone years of age. Thirdly, the marriage was very fruitful, resulting in the birth of nine children in the space of eighteen years. Fourthly, they were never harassed by the spectre of Poverty, which so often when it enters the door causes love to fly out of the window. But all these things are true of many a pair who have begun their wedded life under auspices as propitious, although not so splendid, as those which attended the marriage of the Queen. For early marriages no doubt there is much to be said, although few parents would care to see their girls and boys married before they were two-and-twenty. In favour of such an early union there is to be urged the greater facility with which two youthful lives can merge into one, but there is against it the possibility that the character may not be set, and that the qualities which charm a girl of twenty may not commend themselves to the mature judgment of thirty or forty. In the case of the Queen, the severe discipline of her training and the steadying weight of a great responsibility made her older than her years. As for the Prince Consort, he seems to have been born with an old head upon his shoulders. Certainly he was older at twenty-one than many men are at twenty-five. The mere tale of