operatic tenor, might have remarked that there was
something of the butler about him now. Beside Victoria, he presented a
painful contrast. She, too, was stout, but it was with the plumpness of
a vigorous matron; and an eager vitality was everywhere visible--in her
energetic bearing, her protruding, enquiring glances, her small, fat,
capable, and commanding hands. If only, by some sympathetic magic, she
could have conveyed into that portly, flabby figure, that desiccated and
discouraged brain, a measure of the stamina and the self-assurance which
were so pre-eminently hers!

But suddenly she was reminded that there were other perils besides those
of ill-health. During a visit to Coburg in 1860, the Prince was very
nearly killed in a carriage accident. He escaped with a few cuts and
bruises; but Victoria's alarm was extreme, though she concealed it. "It
is when the Queen feels most deeply," she wrote afterwards, "that she
always appears calmest, and she could not and dared not allow herself
to speak of what might have been, or even to admit to herself (and she
cannot and dare not now) the entire danger, for her head would turn!"
Her agitation, in fact, was only surpassed by her thankfulness to God.
She felt, she said, that she could not rest "without doing something to
mark permanently her feelings," and she decided that she would endow a
charity in Coburg. "L1,000, or even L2,000, given either at once, or
in instalments yearly, would not, in the Queen's opinion, be too much."
Eventually, the smaller sum having been fixed upon, it was invested in
a trust, called the "Victoria-Stift," in the name of the Burgomaster and
chief clergyman of Coburg, who were directed to distribute the interest
yearly among a certain number of young men and women of exemplary
character belonging to the humbler ranks of life.

Shortly afterwards the Queen underwent, for the first time in her life,
the actual experience of close personal loss. Early in 1861 the Duchess
of Kent was taken seriously ill, and in March she died. The event
overwhelmed Victoria. With a morbid intensity, she filled her diary
for pages with minute descriptions of her mother's last hours, her
dissolution, and her corpse, interspersed with vehement apostrophes, and
the agitated outpourings of emotional reflection. In the grief of the
present the disagreements of the past were totally forgotten. It was the
horror and the mystery of Death--Death, present and actual--that se