d art. Beginning with agriculture--the
improvement of stock and the better housing of agricultural
laborers, we trace the effect of his constant toil in the series of
industrial triumphs, of which the great exhibition of 1851 was the
magnificent precursor; and, in recent years, the same kind of
objects have always enlisted the best energies of the queen and her
children.

[Illustration: Victoria greeted as Queen.]

The contrast is great and touching between the scene in Westminster
Abbey, when, amid the pomp of a gorgeous ceremonial and the
acclamation of her subjects, the fair girl-queen received the crown
of Britain, and that other scene, when, after fifty years of a
government that has been unblemished, she once more kneels in the
same spot--a widow surrounded by her children and her children's
children, bearing the burden of many sad as well as blessed
memories, and encompassed with the thanksgivings of the three
hundred millions of her subjects. We can imagine how oppressive, for
one so loving, must then be the vision of the past, as she recalls,
one after another, the once familiar and dear faces which greeted
her coronation, those relatives, great ministers of state, and
warriors of whom so few survive; and when all her happy married
years and the years of parting and desolation appear in vivid
retrospect. But if ever monarch had cause to bless God for His
tender mercies, it must be she who can combine with the memory of
her own life's hopes and trials the consciousness that, in the great
work given her as a sovereign, she has been enabled to fulfil the
beautiful desire of her innocent childhood, when, on her first being
informed of her royal destiny, she indulged in no vain dream of
power, but uttered the simple longing "to be good." That goodness
has been her real greatness.

The life of her majesty is marked by three great stages--her youth,
her married life, and her widowhood. Each is bound to each by the
tie of a consistent growth, passing through those experiences which
are typical of God's education of His children, whether high or low,
rich or poor.

Her childhood, with its wise education, is very much the key to her
after-life. Possessed naturally of a quick intellectual capacity,
and an unusually accurate memory, a taste for music and the arts,
and a deeply affectionate heart, she was admirably brought up by her
mother, the Duchess of Kent, on whom the training of the future
queen devolved from h