nd descended one or two steps to save him the ascent. The
ready natural kindliness of the royal action awoke ecstatic applause,
which could hardly have been heartier had the applauders known how
true a type that act supplied of Her Majesty's future conduct. She
has never feared to peril her dignity by descending a step or two
from her throne, when "sweet mercy, nobility's true badge," has
seemed to require such a descent. And her queenly dignity has never
been thereby lessened. "She never ceases to be a Queen," says
Greville _a propos_ of this scene, "and is always the most charming,
cheerful, obliging, unaffected Queen in the world."

[Illustration: Elizabeth Fry]

That "the people" were more considered in the arrangements for this
coronation than they had been on any previous occasion of the sort
was a circumstance quite in harmony with certain other signs of the
times. "The night is darkest before the dawn," and amid all the gloom
which enshrouded the land there could be discerned the stir and
movement that herald the coming of the day. Men's minds were turning
more and more to the healing of the world's wounds. Already one great
humane enterprise had been carried through in the emancipation of the
slaves in British Colonies; already the vast work of prison reform
had been well begun, through the saintly Elizabeth Fry, whose life of
faithful service ended ere the Queen had reigned eight years. The
very year of Her Majesty's accession was signalised by two noteworthy
endeavours to put away wrong. We will turn first to that which
_seems_ the least immediately philanthropic, although the injustice
which it remedied was trivial in appearance only, since in its
everyday triviality it weighed most heavily on the most numerous
class--that of the humble and the poor.

[Illustration: Rowland Hill]

How would the Englishman of to-day endure the former exactions of the
Post Office? The family letters of sixty years ago, written on the
largest sheets purchasable, crossed and crammed to the point of
illegibility, filled with the news of many and many a week, still
witness of the time when "a letter from London to Brighton cost
eightpence, to Aberdeen one and threepence-halfpenny, to Belfast one
and fourpence"; when, "if the letter were written on more than one
sheet, it came under the operation of a higher scale of charges," and
when the privilege of franking letters, enjoyed and very largely
exercised by members of Parliame