s mouth. I am glad to think that not one querulous word did
His Royal Highness, in his great agony, utter. They only say that his
loud, incessant cries bore testimony to the perfect lungs for which the
House of Hanover is most justly famed. Irreiterate be the horror of that
epoch!

As yet, when we know not even what his first words will be, it is too
early to predict what verdict posterity will pass upon him. Already he
has won the hearts of the people; but, in the years which, it is to be
hoped, still await him, he may accomplish more. Attendons! He stands
alone among European princes--but, as yet, only with the aid of a chair.

London, 1895.

1880

Say, shall these things be forgotten
In the Row that men call Rotten,
Beauty Clare?--Hamilton Aide.

'History,' it has been said, 'does not repeat itself. The historians
repeat one another.' Now, there are still some periods with which no
historian has grappled, and, strangely enough, the period that most
greatly fascinates me is one of them. The labour I set myself is
therefore rather Herculean. But it is also, for me, so far a labour of
love that I can quite forget or even revel in its great difficulty. I
would love to have lived in those bygone days, when first society was
inducted into the mysteries of art and, not losing yet its old and
elegant tenue, babbled of blue china and white lilies, of the painter
Rossetti and the poet Swinburne. It would be a splendid thing to have
seen the tableaux at Cromwell House or to have made my way through the
Fancy Fair and bartered all for a cigarette from a shepherdess; to have
walked in the Park, straining my eyes for a glimpse of the Jersey
Lily; danced the livelong afternoon to the strains of the Manola Valse;
clapped holes in my gloves for Connie Gilchrist.

It is a pity that the historians have held back so long. For this
period is now so remote from us that much in it is nearly impossible to
understand, more than a little must be left in the mists of antiquity
that involve it. The memoirs of the day are, indeed, many, but not
exactly illuminative. From such writers as Frith, Montague Williams or
the Bancrofts, you may gain but little peculiar knowledge. That quaint
old chronicler, Lucy, dilates amusingly enough upon the frown of Sir
Richard (afterwards Lord) Cross or the tea-rose in the Prime Minister's
button-hole. But what can he tell us of the negotiations that led
Gladstone back to public life