let,
and we came in at the beginning of it. Mr. Charles Kean (son of
old Kean) acted the part of Hamlet, and I must say beautifully.
His conception of this very difficult, and I may almost say
incomprehensible, character is admirable; his delivery of all the fine
long speeches quite beautiful; he is excessively graceful and all
his actions and attitudes are good, though not at all good-looking in
face... I came away just as Hamlet was over." Later on, she went to see
Macready in King Lear. The story was new to her; she knew nothing about
it, and at first she took very little interest in what was passing on
the stage; she preferred to chatter and laugh with the Lord Chamberlain.
But, as the play went on, her mood changed; her attention was fixed, and
then she laughed no more. Yet she was puzzled; it seemed a strange, a
horrible business. What did Lord M. think? Lord M. thought it was a
very fine play, but to be sure, "a rough, coarse play, written for
those times, with exaggerated characters." "I'm glad you've seen it," he
added. But, undoubtedly, the evenings which she enjoyed most were those
on which there was dancing. She was always ready enough to seize
any excuse--the arrival of cousins--a birthday--a gathering of young
people--to give the command for that. Then, when the band played, and
the figures of the dancers swayed to the music, and she felt her own
figure swaying too, with youthful spirits so close on every side--then
her happiness reached its height, her eyes sparkled, she must go on and
on into the small hours of the morning. For a moment Lord M. himself was
forgotten.

V

The months flew past. The summer was over: "the pleasantest summer I
EVER passed in MY LIFE, and I shall never forget this first summer of
my reign." With surprising rapidity, another summer was upon her. The
coronation came and went--a curious dream. The antique, intricate,
endless ceremonial worked itself out as best it could, like some machine
of gigantic complexity which was a little out of order. The small
central figure went through her gyrations. She sat; she walked; she
prayed; she carried about an orb that was almost too heavy to hold; the
Archbishop of Canterbury came and crushed a ring upon the wrong finger,
so that she was ready to cry out with the pain; old Lord Rolle tripped
up in his mantle and fell down the steps as he was doing homage; she
was taken into a side chapel, where the altar was covered with a
table-cloth, s