d with the
confidence of her Sovereign, and that confidence cannot be betrayed.
The letters are in safe custody, and there they will remain. On reading
them it is impossible not to be struck with Queen Victoria's amazing
shrewdness, and with her unfailing common sense. It so happens that
both a brother and a sister of mine, the late Duchess of Buccleuch,
were brought into very close contact with Queen Victoria. It was this
quality of strong common sense in the Queen which continually impressed
them, as well as her very high standard of duty.

My brother George was twice Secretary of State for India. The Queen was
fond of suggesting amendments in the wording of dispatches relating to
India, whilst not altering their sense. My brother tells me that the
alterations suggested by the Queen were invariably in the direction of
simplification. The Queen had a knack of stripping away unnecessary
verbiage and reducing a sentence to its simplest form, in which its
meaning was unmistakably clear.

All Queen Victoria's tastes were simple. She liked simplicity in dress,
in food, and in her surroundings. If I may say so without disrespect, I
think that Queen Victoria's great hold on her people came from the fact
that, in spite of her high station, she had the ideals, the tastes, the
likes and dislikes of the average clean-living, clean-minded wife of
the average British professional man, together with the strict ideals
as to the sanctity of the marriage-tie, the strong sense of duty, and
the high moral standard such wives usually possess.

It is, of course, the easy fashion now to sneer at Victorian standards.
To my mind they embody all that is clean and sound in the nation. It
does not follow that because Victorians revelled in hideous wall-papers
and loved ugly furniture, that therefore their points-of-view were
mistaken ones. There are things more important than wall-papers. They
certainly liked the obvious in painting, in music, and perhaps in
literature, but it hardly seems to follow logically from that, that
their conceptions of a man's duty to his wife, family, and country were
necessarily false ones. They were not afflicted with the perpetual
modern restlessness, nor did they spend "their time in nothing else,
but either to tell, or to hear some new thing"; still, all their ideas
seem to me eminently sweet and wholesome.

In her old age my mother was the last person living who had seen George
III. She remembered perfectly