Queen during a cruelly short space
of years. In 1878 the Princess Alice, who had married in 1862 the Prince
Louis of Hesse-Darmstadt, died in tragic circumstances. In the following
year the Prince Imperial, the only son of the Empress Eugenie, to whom
Victoria, since the catastrophe of 1870, had become devotedly attached,
was killed in the Zulu War. Two years later, in 1881, the Queen lost
Lord Beaconsfield, and, in 1883, John Brown. In 1884 the Prince Leopold,
Duke of Albany, who had been an invalid from birth, died prematurely,
shortly after his marriage. Victoria's cup of sorrows was indeed
overflowing; and the public, as it watched the widowed mother weeping
for her children and her friends, displayed a constantly increasing
sympathy.

An event which occurred in 1882 revealed and accentuated the feelings of
the nation. As the Queen, at Windsor, was walking from the train to her
carriage, a youth named Roderick Maclean fired a pistol at her from a
distance of a few yards. An Eton boy struck up Maclean's arm with an
umbrella before the pistol went off; no damage was done, and the culprit
was at once arrested. This was the last of a series of seven attempts
upon the Queen--attempts which, taking place at sporadic intervals over
a period of forty years, resembled one another in a curious manner. All,
with a single exception, were perpetrated by adolescents, whose motives
were apparently not murderous, since, save in the case of Maclean, none
of their pistols was loaded. These unhappy youths, who, after buying
their cheap weapons, stuffed them with gunpowder and paper, and then
went off, with the certainty of immediate detection, to click them in
the face of royalty, present a strange problem to the psychologist. But,
though in each case their actions and their purposes seemed to be so
similar, their fates were remarkably varied. The first of them, Edward
Oxford, who fired at Victoria within a few months of her marriage, was
tried for high treason, declared to be insane, and sent to an asylum for
life. It appears, however, that this sentence did not commend itself to
Albert, for when, two years later, John Francis committed the same of
fence, and was tried upon the same charge, the Prince propounced that
there was no insanity in the matter. "The wretched creature," he told
his father, was "not out of his mind, but a thorough scamp." "I hope,"
he added, "his trial will be conducted with the greatest strictness."
Apparent