from personal knowledge; others contained
much of current gossip, passing stories, hasty impressions; all were
interesting. A remarkable feature of nearly all that was written
regarding His Majesty was the absence of serious criticism or the
slightest cause for condemnation in a life of forty-five years lived in
the continuous white light which beats upon Royalty with such merciless
precision.

The facts are that King George was and had been essentially a sailor
Prince; that he had in his younger days been open-handed, free, and
possessed of a certain natural and bluff and pleasant geniality which
was, however, quite different from the urbane, charming, courtly
geniality of King Edward; that something of this characteristic had
disappeared from public view after the death of his brother, the Duke of
Clarence, and his own assumption of public duties and public work as
heir presumptive--functions greatly enlarged by the accession of his
father to the Throne; that in his travels through the outer spaces, the
vast Colonial Dominions, of the Empire he was too hedged about with
etiquette, too much surrounded by a varied, and constantly changing, and
bewildering environment to exhibit anything except devotion to the
immediate duty of the moment; that under the circumstances of his
Imperial tours, amidst political conditions wherein a wrong word or even
an unwise gesture might, upon occasions, evoke a storm, where not even
his carefully-selected suite could be expected to understand all the
varied shades of political strife and the infinite varieties of public
opinion, it would have been more than human for him to show continuous
geniality--as that word is interpreted in democratic countries; that
upon many occasions and despite these obstacles he did thoroughly
indicate a personal and unaffected enjoyment very different in manner
from that of a prince receiving a formal address--notably so in his
drives around Quebec during the Tercentenary; that the responsibilities
of his position, the personal limitations of his environment, the
difficulties always surrounding an heir to the throne, had however, and
upon the whole, sobered the one-time "jolly" Prince into a serious and
thoughtful personage--a statesman in the making; that he was, what none
of the Royal family had ever been, something of an orator as he proved
by his splendid speech in London upon returning from the Empire tour of
1901 and by his delivery of otherwise routi