f Belgium, who had always been one of her chief advisers,
desired her to marry Albert, and urged the matter after her accession to
the throne, but Victoria's answer was, "I am too young and he is too
young. I shall not think of marrying for four years yet." However, when
in 1839 Albert and his brother came to England, it was unnecessary for
uncle or ministers to urge upon Victoria the wisdom of a speedy
marriage; her own heart was her counselor, and Albert had not been long
in the palace, before the queen, to whom it was impossible that he
should propose marriage, proposed marriage to him. She persisted in
looking upon it as a sacrifice on Albert's part, but we may readily
believe that he looked upon it in no such manner. They were married on
February 10, 1840, and then began a life of domestic happiness which was
unbroken until the death of Albert.

Immediately after the wedding the young couple drove to Windsor, passing
through over twenty miles of frantically cheering, loyal subjects. On
their return, after a brief season of seclusion, to Buckingham Palace,
Victoria turned her attention at once to her royal duties, and Albert
showed himself from the outset a man peculiarly fitted to aid and advise
her. His one desire was to sink his own individuality in that of the
queen, but this was by no means her desire. She could not bear that her
husband should be regarded as in any way subordinate to herself--that he
should be forced to take a lower seat, or to walk behind her; and it was
a real grief to her that she was not able to bestow upon him the title
of "King Consort" rather than that of "Prince Consort." In one of her
first letters after her marriage, Victoria said of her husband, "There
cannot exist a purer, dearer, nobler being in the world than the
prince," and this same attitude toward her husband she kept throughout
her life.

Victoria and Albert had nine children, the first the Princess Victoria,
being born in November, 1840, and the second, the Prince of Wales,
afterward Edward VII of England, being born in November, 1841. The
pictures that we have of the home life of this royal family; of the
discipline, loving but firm, to which the children were subjected, and
of the way in which the parents really lived with their children, are
most charming. A little story tells how the Princess Victoria, when but
a child, was told that if she persisted in speaking to the family
physician simply as "Brown" without prefixi