ce
crowned the superbest procession England ever saw, she looked
immeasurably more like a mighty mother of her martial sons than like a
majestic monarch in the midst of her exulting subjects. Filial love
and filial loyalty that day reached their climax. Till then the best
informed knew not how truly she was the mother of us all!

III. _Her prodigious hold upon the hearts of her people was largely
due to the unexampled length of her reign._

That she ever reigned is one of the many marvels of divine mercy found
in the history of our native land. Note that her father was not the
first, but the fourth son of old King George III.; that the three
elder sons all died childless, and that her own father died within a
few months of her birth. Victoria seems to have been as truly a
special gift of God to England as Samuel was to Israel. This longest
of all reigns was unmarred by any break of any kind from first to
last. Had our princess come to the throne only a few months earlier a
regency must have been proclaimed, and had she lingered a few months
longer increasing infirmities might have forced that same calamity
upon us. But through God's mercy hers was a full orbed reign. There
was no abdication of her power for a single day. The first serious
illness of her life was also her last, and to her it was granted to
cease at once to work and live.

So long ago as September 1852, when her devoted friend and adviser,
the famous Duke of Wellington, died, she pathetically said "I shall
soon stand sadly alone"; then naming one after another of her recent
intimates she added "They are all gone!" That of necessity became
increasingly true in the course of the remaining half century of her
life. Not one among the many friends of her youth remained at her side
amid the deepening shadows of her eventide. Surrounded by new
acquaintances and new kinships a loneliness was hers, which few of us
are ever likely in any similar measure to experience.

Every throne in Europe except her own has witnessed repeated changes
in the course of her strangely eventful career, sometimes as the
result of appalling revolutions ans sometimes as the fruit of a
dastardly assassin's dagger; but amid all He who was Abraham's shield
and exceeding great reward deigned to compass our Queen with songs of
deliverance. Never was any monarch so much prayed for; and that she
may long reign over us is a petition that in special measure has
prevailed. Not three score ye