he Queen had been absolute. When
Lord Derby, the Prime Minister, had an audience of Her Majesty after
a serious illness, he mentioned it afterwards, as a proof of the royal
favour, that the Queen had remarked "How sorry she was she could not ask
him to be seated." Subsequently, Disraeli, after an attack of gout
and in a moment of extreme expansion on the part of Victoria, had
been offered a chair; but he had thought it wise humbly to decline the
privilege. In her later years, however, the Queen invariably asked Mr.
Gladstone and Lord Salisbury to sit down.

Sometimes the solemnity of the evening was diversified by a concert, an
opera, or even a play. One of the most marked indications of
Victoria's enfranchisement from the thraldom of widowhood had been
her resumption--after an interval of thirty years--of the custom of
commanding dramatic companies from London to perform before the Court at
Windsor. On such occasions her spirits rose high. She loved acting; she
loved a good plot; above all, she loved a farce. Engrossed by everything
that passed upon the stage she would follow, with childlike innocence,
the unwinding of the story; or she would assume an air of knowing
superiority and exclaim in triumph, "There! You didn't expect that, did
you?" when the denouement came. Her sense of humour was of a vigorous
though primitive kind. She had been one of the very few persons who had
always been able to appreciate the Prince Consort's jokes; and, when
those were cracked no more, she could still roar with laughter, in the
privacy of her household, over some small piece of fun--some oddity of
an ambassador, or some ignorant Minister's faux pas. When the jest grew
subtle she was less pleased; but, if it approached the confines of the
indecorous, the danger was serious. To take a liberty called down at
once Her Majesty's most crushing disapprobation; and to say something
improper was to take the greatest liberty of all. Then the royal
lips sank down at the corners, the royal eyes stared in astonished
protrusion, and in fact, the royal countenance became inauspicious in
the highest degree. The transgressor shuddered into silence, while the
awful "We are not amused" annihilated the dinner table. Afterwards,
in her private entourage, the Queen would observe that the person in
question was, she very much feared, "not discreet"; it was a verdict
from which there was no appeal.

In general, her aesthetic tastes had remained unchanged