."

This print was given to me by a veteran Reformer, who told me that it
expressed in visible form the universal sentiment of England. That
sentiment was daily and hourly confirmed by all that was heard and seen
of the girl-queen. We read of her walking with a gallant suite upon the
terrace at Windsor; dressed in scarlet uniform and mounted on her roan
charger, to receive with uplifted hand the salute of her troops; or
seated on the throne of the Plantagenets at the opening of her
Parliament, and invoking the Divine benediction on the labours which
should conduce to "the welfare and contentment of My people." We see her
yielding her bright intelligence to the constitutional guidance, wise
though worldly, of her first Prime Minister, the sagacious Melbourne.
And then, when the exigencies of parliamentary government forced her to
exchange her Whig advisers for the Tories, we see her carrying out with
exact propriety the lessons taught by "the friend of her youth," and
extending to each premier in turn, whether personally agreeable to her
or not, the same absolute confidence and loyalty.

As regards domestic life, we have been told by Mr. Gladstone that "even
among happy marriages her marriage was exceptional, so nearly did the
union of thought, heart, and action both fulfil the ideal and bring
duality near to the borders of identity."

And so twenty years went on, full of an ever-growing popularity, and a
purifying influence on the tone of society never fully realized till the
personal presence was withdrawn. And then came the blow which crushed
her life--"the sun going down at noon"--and total disappearance from all
festivity and parade and social splendour, but never from political
duty. In later years we have seen the gradual resumption of more public
offices; the occasional reappearances, so earnestly anticipated by her
subjects, and hedged with something of a divinity more than regal; the
incomparable majesty of personal bearing which has taught so many an
onlooker that dignity has nothing to do with height, or beauty or
splendour of raiment; and, mingled with that majesty and unspeakably
enhancing it, the human sympathy with suffering and sorrow, which has
made Queen Victoria, as none of her predecessors ever was or could be,
the Mother of her People.

And the response of the English people to that sympathy--the recognition
of that motherhood--is written, not only in the printed records of the
reign, but on the