benignity flowed from the aged Queen. Her smile, once so rare a visitant to

those saddened features, flitted over them with an easy alacrity; the blue
eyes beamed; the whole face, starting suddenly from its pendulous

expressionlessness, brightened and softened and cast over those who watched it
an unforgettable charm. For in her last years there was a fascination in

Victoria's amiability which had been lacking even from the vivid impulse of
her youth. Over all who approached her--or very nearly all--she threw a

peculiar spell. Her grandchildren adored her; her ladies waited upon her with
a reverential love. The honour of serving her obliterated a thousand

inconveniences--the monotony of a court existence, the fatigue of standing,
the necessity for a superhuman attentiveness to the minutia: of time and

space. As one did one's wonderful duty one could forget that one's legs were
aching from the infinitude of the passages at Windsor, or that one's bare arms

were turning blue in the Balmoral cold.
What, above all, seemed to make such service delightful was the detailed

interest which the Queen took in the circumstances of those around her. Her
absorbing passion for the comfortable commonplaces, the small crises, the

recurrent sentimentalities, of domestic life constantly demanded wider fields
for its activity; the sphere of her own family, vast as it was, was not

enough; she became the eager confidante of the household affairs of her
ladies; her sympathies reached out to the palace domestics; even the

housemaids and scullions--so it appeared--were the objects of her searching
inquiries, and of her heartfelt solicitude when their lovers were ordered to a

foreign station, or their aunts suffered from an attack of rheumatism which
was more than usually acute.

Nevertheless the due distinctions of rank were immaculately preserved. The
Queen's mere presence was enough to ensure that; but, in addition, the

dominion of court etiquette was paramount. For that elaborate code, which had
kept Lord Melbourne stiff upon the sofa and ranged the other guests in silence

about the round table according to the order of precedence, was as
punctiliously enforced as ever. Every evening after dinner, the hearth-rug,

sacred to royalty, loomed before the profane in inaccessible glory, or, on one
or two terrific occasions, actually lured them magnetically forward to the

very edge of the abyss. The Queen, at the fitting moment, moved towards her
guests; one after the other they were led up to her; and, while dialogue

followed dialogue in constraint and embarrassment, the rest of the assembly
stood still, without a word. Only in one particular was the severity of the

etiquette allowed to lapse. Throughout the greater part of the reign the rule
that ministers must stand during their audiences with the Queen had been

absolute. When Lord Derby, the Prime Minister, had an audience of Her Majesty
after a serious illness, he mentioned it afterwards, as a proof of the royal

favour, that the Queen had remarked "How sorry she was she could not ask him
to be seated." Subsequently, Disraeli, after an attack of gout and in a moment

of extremeexpansion on the part of Victoria, had been offered a chair; but he
had thought it wise humbly to decline the privilege. In her later years,

however, the Queen invariably asked Mr. Gladstone and Lord Salisbury to sit
down.

Sometimes the solemnity of the evening was diversified by a concert, an opera,
or even a play. One of the most marked indications of Victoria's

enfranchisement from the thraldom of widowhood had been her resumption--after
an interval of thirty years--of the custom of commanding dramatic companies

from London to perform before the Court at Windsor. On such occasions her
spirits rose high. She loved acting; she loved a good plot; above all, she

loved a farce. Engrossed by everything that passed upon the stage she would
follow, with childlike innocence, the unwinding of the story; or she would

assume an air of knowingsuperiority and exclaim in triumph, "There! You
didn't expect that, did you?" when the denouement came. Her sense of humour

was of a vigorous though primitive kind. She had been one of the very few
persons who had always been able to appreciate the Prince Consort's jokes;

and, when those were cracked no more, she could still roar with laughter, in
the privacy of her household, over some small piece of fun--some oddity of an

ambassador, or some ignorant Minister's faux pas. When the jest grew subtle
she was less pleased; but, if it approached the confines of the indecorous,

the danger was serious. To take a liberty called down at once Her Majesty's
most crushing disapprobation; and to say something improper was to take the

greatest liberty of all. Then the royal lips sank down at the corners, the
royal eyes stared in astonished protrusion, and in fact, the royal countenance

became inauspicious in the highest degree. The transgressor shuddered into
silence, while the awful "We are not amused" annihilated the dinner table.

Afterwards, in her private entourage, the Queen would observe that the person
in question was, she very much feared, "not discreet"; it was a verdict from

which there was no appeal.
In general, her aesthetic tastes had remained unchanged since the days of

Mendelssohn, Landseer, and Lablache. She still delighted in the roulades of
Italian opera; she still demanded a high standard in the execution of a

pianoforte duet. Her views on painting were decided; Sir Edwin, she declared,
was perfect; she was much impressed by Lord Leighton's manners; and she

profoundly distrusted Mr. Watts. From time to time she ordered engraved
portraits to be taken of members of the royal family; on these occasions she

would have the first proofs submitted to her, and, having inspected them with
minute particularity, she would point out their mistakes to the artists,

indicating at the same time how they might be corrected. The artists
invariably discovered that Her Majesty's suggestions were of the highest

value. In literature her interests were more restricted. She was devoted to
Lord Tennyson; and, as the Prince Consort had admired George Eliot, she

perused "Middlemarch:" she was disappointed. There is reason to believe,
however, that the romances of another femalewriter, whose popularity among

the humbler classes of Her Majesty's subjects was at one time enormous,
secured, no less, the approval of Her Majesty. Otherwise she did not read very

much.
Once, however, the Queen's attention was drawn to a publication which it was

impossible for her to ignore. "The Greville Memoirs," filled with a mass of
historical information of extraordinary importance, but filled also with

descriptions, which were by no means flattering, of George IV, William IV, and
other royal persons, was brought out by Mr. Reeve. Victoria read the book, and

was appalled. It was, she declared, a "dreadful and really scandalous book,"
and she could not say "how HORRIFIED and INDIGNANT" she was at Greville's

"indiscretion, indelicacy, ingratitude towards friends, betrayal of confidence
and shameful disloyalty towards his Sovereign." She wrote to Disraeli to tell

him that in her opinion it was "VERY IMPORTANT that the book should be
severely censured and discredited." "The tone in which he speaks of royalty,"

she added, "is unlike anything one sees in history even, and is most
reprehensible." Her anger was directed with almost equal vehemence against Mr.

Reeve for his having published "such an abominable book," and she charged Sir
Arthur Helps to convey to him her deep displeasure. Mr. Reeve, however, was

impenitent. When Sir Arthur told him that, in the Queen's opinion, "the book
degraded royalty," he replied: "Not at all; it elevates it by the contrast it

offers between the present and the defunct state of affairs." But this adroit
defence failed to make any impression upon Victoria; and Mr. Reeve, when he

retired from the public service, did not receive the knighthood which custom
entitled him to expect. Perhaps if the Queen had known how many caustic

comments upon herself Mr. Reeve had quietly suppressed in the published
Memoirs, she would have been almost grateful to him; but, in that case, what

would she have said of Greville? Imagination boggles at the thought. As for
more modern essays upon the same topic, Her Majesty, it is to be feared, would

have characterised them as "not discreet."
But as a rule the leisure hours of that active life were occupied with

recreations of a less intangible quality than the study of literature or the
appreciation of art. Victoria was a woman not only of vast property but of

innumerable possessions. She had inherited an immense quantity of furniture,
of ornaments, of china, of plate, of valuable objects of every kind; her

purchases, throughout a long life, made a formidableaddition to these stores;
and there flowed in upon her, besides, from every quarter of the globe, a

constant stream of gifts. Over this enormous mass she exercised an unceasing
and minute supervision, and the arrangement and the contemplation of it, in

all its details, filled her with an intimatesatisfaction. The collecting
instinct has its roots in the very depths of human nature; and, in the case of

Victoria, it seemed to owe its force to two of her dominating impulses--the
intense sense, which had always been hers, of her own personality, and the

craving which, growing with the years, had become in her old age almost an
obsession, for fixity, for solidity, for the setting up of palpable barriers

against the outrages of change and time. When she considered the multitudinous
objects which belonged to her, or, better still, when, choosing out some

section of them as the fancy took her, she actually savoured the vivid
richness of their individual qualities, she saw herself deliciously reflected

from a million facets, felt herself magnified miraculously over a boundless
area, and was well pleased. That was just as it should be; but then came the

dismaying thought--everything slips away, crumbles, vanishes; Sevres
dinner-services get broken; even golden basins go unaccountably astray; even

one's self, with all the recollections and experiences that make up one's
being, fluctuates, perishes, dissolves... But no! It could not, should not be

so! There should be no changes and no losses! Nothing should ever
move--neither the past nor the present--and she herself least of all! And so

the tenacious woman, hoarding her valuables, decreed their immortality with
all the resolution of her soul. She would not lose one memory or one pin.

She gave orders that nothing should be thrown away--and nothing was. There, in
drawer after drawer, in wardrobe after wardrobe, reposed the dresses of

seventy years. But not only the dresses --the furs and the mantles and