memorable place. It was, besides, the kind of figure which naturally called

forth the admiring sympathy of the great majority of the nation. Goodness they
prized above every other human quality; and Victoria, who had said that she

would be good at the age of twelve, had kept her word. Duty, conscience,
morality--yes! in the light of those high beacons the Queen had always lived.

She had passed her days in work and not in pleasure--in public
responsibilities and family cares. The standard of solid virtue which had been

set up so long ago amid the domestic happiness of Osborne had never been
lowered for an instant. For more than half a century no divorced lady had

approached the precincts of the Court. Victoria, indeed, in her enthusiasm for
wifely fidelity, had laid down a still stricter ordinance: she frowned

severely upon any widow who married again. Considering that she herself was
the offspring of a widow's second marriage, this prohibition might be regarded

as an eccentricity; but, no doubt, it was an eccentricity on the right side.
The middle classes, firm in the triple brass of their respectability, rejoiced

with a special joy over the most respectable of Queens. They almost claimed
her, indeed, as one of themselves; but this would have been an exaggeration.

For, though many of her characteristics were most often found among the middle
classes, in other respects--in her manners, for instance--Victoria was

decidedly aristocratic. And, in one important particular, she was neither
aristocratic nor middle-class: her attitude toward herself was simply regal.

Such qualities were obvious and important; but, in the impact of a
personality, it is something deeper, something fundamental and common to all

its qualities, that really tells. In Victoria, it is easy to discern the
nature of this underlying element: it was a peculiarsincerity. Her

truthfulness, her single-mindedness, the vividness of her emotions and her
unrestrained expression of them, were the varied forms which this central

characteristic assumed. It was her sincerity which gave her at once her
impressiveness, her charm, and her absurdity. She moved through life with the

imposing certitude of one to whom concealment was impossible--either towards
her surroundings or towards herself. There she was, all of her--the Queen of

England, complete and obvious; the world might take her or leave her; she had
nothing more to show, or to explain, or to modify; and, with her peerless

carriage, she swept along her path. And not only was concealment out of the
question; reticence, reserve, even dignity itself, as it sometimes seemed,

might be very well dispensed with. As Lady Lyttelton said: "There is a
transparency in her truth that is very striking--not a shade of exaggeration

in describing feelings or facts; like very few other people I ever knew. Many
may be as true, but I think it goes often along with some reserve. She talks

all out; just as it is, no more and no less." She talked all out; and she
wrote all out, too. Her letters, in the surprising jet of their expression,

remind one of a turned-on tap. What is within pours forth in an immediate,
spontaneous rush. Her utterly unliterary style has at least the merit of being

a vehicle exactly suited to her thoughts and feelings; and even the platitude
of her phraseology carries with it a curiously personal flavour. Undoubtedly

it was through her writings that she touched the heart of the public. Not only
in her "Highland Journals" where the mild chronicle of her private proceedings

was laid bare without a trace either of affectation or of embarrassment, but
also in those remarkable messages to the nation which, from time to time, she

published in the newspapers, her people found her very close to them indeed.
They felt instinctively Victoria's irresistiblesincerity, and they responded.

And in truth it was an endearing trait.
The personality and the position, too--the wonderful combination of

them--that, perhaps, was what was finally fascinating in the case. The little
old lady, with her white hair and her plain mourning clothes, in her wheeled

chair or her donkey-carriage--one saw her so; and then--close behind--with
their immediate suggestion of singularity, of mystery, and of power--the

Indian servants. That was the familiar vision, and it was admirable; but, at
chosen moments, it was right that the widow of Windsor should step forth

apparent Queen. The last and the most glorious of such occasions was the
Jubilee of 1897. Then, as the splendid procession passed along, escorting

Victoria through the thronged re-echoing streets of London on her progress of
thanksgiving to St. Paul's Cathedral, the greatness of her realm and the

adoration of her subjects blazed out together. The tears welled to her eyes,
and, while the multitude roared round her, "How kind they are to me! How kind

they are!" she repeated over and over again. That night her message flew over
the Empire: "From my heart I thank my beloved people. May God bless them!" The

long journey was nearly done. But the traveller, who had come so far, and
through such strange experiences, moved on with the old unfaltering step. The

girl, the wife, the aged woman, were the same: vitality, conscientiousness,
pride, and simplicity were hers to the latest hour.

CHAPTER X. THE END
The evening had been golden; but, after all, the day was to close in cloud and

tempest. Imperial needs, imperial ambitions, involved the country in the South
African War. There were checks, reverses, bloody disasters; for a moment the

nation was shaken, and the public distresses were felt with intimate
solicitude by the Queen. But her spirit was high, and neither her courage nor

her confidence wavered for a moment. Throwing her self heart and soul into the
struggle, she laboured with redoubled vigour, interested herself in every

detail of the hostilities, and sought by every means in her power to render
service to the national cause. In April 1900, when she was in her eighty-first

year, she made the extraordinary decision to abandon her annual visit to the
South of France, and to go instead to Ireland, which had provided a

particularly large number of recruits to the armies in the field. She stayed
for three weeks in Dublin, driving through the streets, in spite of the

warnings of her advisers, without an armed escort; and the visit was a
complete success. But, in the course of it, she began, for the first time, to

show signs of the fatigue of age.
For the long strain and the unceasing anxiety, brought by the war, made

themselves felt at last. Endowed by nature with a robust constitution,
Victoria, though in periods of depression she had sometimes supposed herself

an invalid, had in reality throughout her life enjoyed remarkably good health.
In her old age, she had suffered from a rheumatic stiffness of the joints,

which had necessitated the use of a stick, and, eventually, a wheeled chair;
but no other ailments attacked her, until, in 1898, her eyesight began to be

affected by incipient cataract. After that, she found reading more and more
difficult, though she could still sign her name, and even, with some

difflculty, write letters. In the summer of 1900, however, more serious
symptoms appeared. Her memory, in whose strength and precision she had so long

prided herself, now sometimes deserted her; there was a tendency towards
aphasia; and, while no specific disease declared itself, by the autumn there

were unmistakable signs of a general physical decay. Yet, even in these last
months, the strain of iron held firm. The daily work continued; nay, it

actually increased; for the Queen, with an astonishing pertinacity, insisted
upon communicating personally with an ever-growing multitude of men and women

who had suffered through the war.
By the end of the year the last remains of her ebbing strength had almost

deserted her; and through the early days of the opening century it was clear
that her dwindling forces were only kept together by an effort of will. On

January 14, she had at Osborne an hour's interview with Lord Roberts, who had
returned victorious from South Africa a few days before. She inquired with

acute anxiety into all the details of the war; she appeared to sustain the
exertion successfully; but, when the audience was over, there was a collapse.

On the following day her medical attendants recognised that her state was
hopeless; and yet, for two days more, the indomitable spirit fought on; for

two days more she discharged the duties of a Queen of England. But after that
there was an end of working; and then, and not till then, did the last

optimism of those about her break down. The brain was failing, and life was
gently slipping away. Her family gathered round her; for a little more she

lingered, speechless and apparentlyinsensible; and, on January 22, 1901, she
died.

When, two days previously, the news of the approaching end had been made
public, astonished grief had swept over the country. It appeared as if some

monstrous reversal of the course of nature was about to take place. The vast
majority of her subjects had never known a time when Queen Victoria had not

been reigning over them. She had become an indissoluble part of their whole
scheme of things, and that they were about to lose her appeared a scarcely

possible thought. She herself, as she lay blind and silent, seemed to those
who watched her to be divested of all thinking--to have glided already,

unawares, into oblivion. Yet, perhaps, in the secret chambers of
consciousness, she had her thoughts, too. Perhaps her fading mind called up

once more the shadows of the past to float before it, and retraced, for the
last time, the vanished visions of that long history--passing back and back,

through the cloud of years, to older and ever older memories--to the spring
woods at Osborne, so full of primroses for Lord Beaconsfield--to Lord

Palmerston's queer clothes and high demeanour, and Albert's face under the
green lamp, and Albert's first stag at Balmoral, and Albert in his blue and

silver uniform, and the Baron coming in through a doorway, and Lord M.
dreaming at Windsor with the rooks cawing in the elm-trees, and the Archbishop

of Canterbury on his knees in the dawn, and the old King's turkey-cock
ejaculations, and Uncle Leopold's soft voice at Claremont, and Lehzen with the