bereavement for
almost as many years as she had lived before it, the chronicle of those
years can bear no proportion to the tale of her earlier life. We must be
content in our ignorance with a brief and summary relation.

The sudden removal of the Prince was not merely a matter of overwhelming
personal concern to Victoria; it was an event of national, of European
importance. He was only forty-two, and in the ordinary course of nature
he might have been expected to live at least thirty years longer. Had
he done so it can hardly be doubted that the whole development of the
English polity would have been changed. Already at the time of his death
he filled a unique place in English public life; already among the inner
circle of politicians he was accepted as a necessary and useful part of
the mechanism of the State. Lord Clarendon, for instance, spoke of his
death as "a national calamity of far greater importance than the public
dream of," and lamented the loss of his "sagacity and foresight," which,
he declared, would have been "more than ever valuable" in the event of
an American war. And, as time went on, the Prince's influence must have
enormously increased. For, in addition to his intellectual and moral
qualities, he enjoyed, by virtue of his position, one supreme advantage
which every other holder of high office in the country was without: he
was permanent. Politicians came and went, but the Prince was perpetually
installed at the centre of affairs. Who can doubt that, towards the end
of the century, such a man, grown grey in the service of the nation,
virtuous, intelligent, and with the unexampled experience of a whole
life-time of government, would have acquired an extraordinary prestige?
If, in his youth, he had been able to pit the Crown against the mighty
Palmerston and to come off with equal honours from the contest, of what
might he not have been capable in his old age? What Minister,
however able, however popular, could have withstood the wisdom, the
irreproachability, the vast prescriptive authority, of the venerable
Prince? It is easy to imagine how, under such a ruler, an attempt might
have been made to convert England into a State as exactly organised,
as elaborately trained, as efficiently equipped, and as autocratically
controlled, as Prussia herself. Then perhaps, eventually, under some
powerful leader--a Gladstone or a Bright--the democratic forces in the
country might have rallied together, and a stru