Parliament. But unfortunately the lady did not
appreciate the compliment. The well-known complaint--"He speaks to me
as if I were a public meeting-" whether authentic or no--and the turn
of the sentence is surely a little too epigrammatic to be genuinely
Victorian--undoubtedly expresses the essential element of her antipathy.
She had no objection to being considered as an institution; she was one,
and she knew it. But she was a woman too, and to be considered ONLY as
an institution--that was unbearable. And thus all Mr. Gladstone's zeal
and devotion, his ceremonious phrases, his low bows, his punctilious
correctitudes, were utterly wasted; and when, in the excess of his
loyalty, he went further, and imputed to the object of his veneration,
with obsequious blindness, the subtlety of intellect, the wide reading,
the grave enthusiasm, which he himself possessed, the misunderstanding
became complete. The discordance between the actual Victoria and this
strange Divinity made in Mr. Gladstone's image produced disastrous
results. Her discomfort and dislike turned at last into positive
animosity, and, though her manners continued to be perfect, she
never for a moment unbent; while he on his side was overcome with
disappointment, perplexity, and mortification.

Yet his fidelity remained unshaken. When the Cabinet met, the Prime
Minister, filled with his beatific vision, would open the proceedings by
reading aloud the letters which he had received from the Queen upon the
questions of the hour. The assembly sat in absolute silence while,
one after another, the royal missives, with their emphases, their
ejaculations, and their grammatical peculiarities, boomed forth in all
the deep solemnity of Mr. Gladstone's utterance. Not a single comment,
of any kind, was ever hazarded; and, after a fitting pause, the Cabinet
proceeded with the business of the day.

II

Little as Victoria appreciated her Prime Minister's attitude towards
her, she found that it had its uses. The popular discontent at her
uninterrupted seclusion had been gathering force for many years, and
now burst out in a new and alarming shape. Republicanism was in the air.
Radical opinion in England, stimulated by the fall of Napoleon III and
the establishment of a republican government in France, suddenly grew
more extreme than it ever had been since 1848. It also became for the
first time almost respectable. Chartism had been entirely an affair of
the lower classes; but