ed
the moral perceptions of the great masses on either side of the
Atlantic. To this type, indeed, we could scarcely find a more complete
antithesis than in the life and character of the great Queen who has
passed away. Nothing more deeply impressed all who came in contact
with her than the essential simplicity and genuineness of her nature.

She was a great ruler, but she was also to the last a true, kindly,
simple-minded woman, retaining with undiminished intensity all the
warmth of a most affectionate nature, all the soundness of a most
excellent judgment. Brought up from childhood in the artificial
atmosphere of a Court, called while still a girl to the isolation of a
throne; deprived, when her reign had yet forty years to run, of the
support and counsel of her husband, she might well have been pardoned
if she often found herself out of touch with large sections of her
people, and had viewed life through a false medium or in partial
aspects. Yet Lord Salisbury probably in no degree exaggerated when he
said that if he wished to ascertain the feelings and opinions of the
English people, and especially of the English middle classes, he knew
no truer or more enlightening judgment than that of the Queen. She
thought with them and she felt with them; she shared their ambitions;
she knew by a kind of intuitive instinct the course of their
judgments; she sympathised deeply with their trials and their sorrows.

She could hardly be called a brilliant woman. It is difficult indeed
to judge the full social capacities of anyone who lives under the
constant restraints of a royal position, but I do not think that in
any sphere of life the Queen would have been regarded as a woman of
striking wit, or originality, or even commanding power. The qualities
that made her so successful in her high calling were of another kind:
supreme good sense; a tact in dealing with men and circumstances so
unfailing that it almost amounted to genius; an indefatigable industry
which never flagged from early youth till extreme old age; a sense of
duty so steady and so strong that it governed all her actions and
pleasures, and saved her not only from the grosser and more common
temptations of an exalted position, but also in a most unusual degree
from the subtle and often half-concealed deflecting influences that
spring from ambition or resentment, from personal predilections and
personal dislikes. It was these qualities, combined with her
unrivalled