shoulders of Albert as he lay dead, surmounted by a wreath of immortelles. At
Balmoral, where memories came crowding so closely, the solid signs of memory

appeared in surprising profusion. Obelisks, pyramids, tombs, statues, cairns,
and seats of inscribed granite, proclaimed Victoria's dedication to the dead.

There, twice a year, on the days that followed her arrival, a solemn
pilgrimage of inspection and meditation was performed. There, on August

26--Albert's birthday--at the foot of the bronzestatue of him in Highland
dress, the Queen, her family, her Court, her servants, and her tenantry, met

together and in silence drank to the memory of the dead. In England the tokens
of remembrance pullulated hardly less. Not a day passed without some addition

to the multifold assemblage--a gold statuette of Ross, the piper--a life-sized
marble group of Victoria and Albert, in medievalcostume, inscribed upon the

base with the words: "Allured to brighter worlds and led the way-" a granite
slab in the shrubbery at Osborne, informing the visitor of "Waldmann: the very

favourite little dachshund of Queen Victoria; who brought him from Baden,
April 1872; died, July 11, 1881."

At Frogmore, the great mausoleum, perpetually enriched, was visited almost
daily by the Queen when the Court was at Windsor. But there was another, a

more secret and a hardly less holy shrine. The suite of rooms which Albert had
occupied in the Castle was kept for ever shut away from the eyes of any save

the most privileged. Within those precincts everything remained as it had been
at the Prince's death; but the mysterious preoccupation of Victoria had

commanded that her husband's clothing should be laid afresh, each evening,
upon the bed, and that, each evening, the water should be set ready in the

basin, as if he were still alive; and this incredible rite was performed with
scrupulous regularity for nearly forty years.

Such was the inner worship; and still the flesh obeyed the spirit; still the
daily hours of labour proclaimed Victoria's consecration to duty and to the

ideal of the dead. Yet, with the years, the sense of self-sacrifice faded; the
natural energies of that ardent being discharged themselves with satisfaction

into the channel of public work; the love of business which, from her
girlhood, had been strong within her, reasserted itself in all its vigour,

and, in her old age, to have been cut off from her papers and her boxes would
have been, not a relief, but an agony to Victoria. Thus, though toiling

Ministers might sigh and suffer, the whole process of government continued,
till the very end, to pass before her. Nor was that all; ancient precedent had

made the validity of an enormous number of official transactions dependent
upon the application of the royal sign-manual; and a great proportion of the

Queen's working hours was spent in this mechanical task. Nor did she show any
desire to diminish it. On the contrary, she voluntarily resumed the duty of

signing commissions in the army, from which she had been set free by Act of
Parliament, and from which, during the years of middle life, she had

abstained. In no case would she countenance the proposal that she should use a
stamp. But, at last, when the increasing pressure of business made the delays

of the antiquated systemintolerable, she consented that, for certain classes
of documents, her oral sanction should be sufficient. Each paper was read

aloud to her, and she said at the end "Approved." Often, for hours at a time,
she would sit, with Albert's bust in front of her, while the word "Approved"

issued at intervals from her lips. The word came forth with a majestic
sonority; for her voice now--how changed from the silverytreble of her

girlhood--was a contralto, full and strong.
IV

The final years were years of apotheosis. In the dazzled imagination of her
subjects Victoria soared aloft towards the regions of divinity through a

nimbus of purest glory. Criticism fell dumb; deficiencies which, twenty years
earlier, would have been universally admitted, were now as universally

ignored. That the nation's idol was a very incomplete representative of the
nation was a circumstance that was hardly noticed, and yet it was

conspicuously true. For the vast changes which, out of the England of 1837,
had produced the England of 1897, seemed scarcely to have touched the Queen.

The immenseindustrial development of the period, the significance of which
had been so thoroughly understood by Albert, meant little indeed to Victoria.

The amazingscientificmovement, which Albert had appreciated no less, left
Victoria perfectly cold. Her conception of the universe, and of man's place in

it, and of the stupendous problems of nature and philosophy remained,
throughout her life, entirely unchanged. Her religion was the religion which

she had learnt from the Baroness Lehzen and the Duchess of Kent. Here, too, it
might have been supposed that Albert's views might have influenced her. For

Albert, in matters of religion, was advanced. Disbelieving altogether in evil
spirits, he had had his doubts about the miracle of the Gaderene Swine.

Stockmar, even, had thrown out, in a remarkablememorandum on the education of
the Prince of Wales, the suggestion that while the child "must unquestionably

be brought up in the creed of the Church of England," it might nevertheless be
in accordance with the spirit of the times to exclude from his religious

training the inculcation of a belief in "the supernatural doctrines of
Christianity." This, however, would have been going too far; and all the royal

children were brought up in complete orthodoxy. Anything else would have
grieved Victoria, though her own conceptions of the orthodox were not very

precise. But her nature, in which imagination and subtlety held so small a
place, made her instinctively" target="_blank" title="ad.本能地">instinctivelyrecoil from the intricate ecstasies of High

Anglicanism; and she seemed to feel most at home in the simple faith of the
Presbyterian Church of Scotland. This was what might have been expected; for

Lehzen was the daughter of a Lutheran pastor, and the Lutherans and the
Presbyterians have much in common. For many years Dr. Norman Macleod, an

innocent Scotch minister, was her principalspiritualadviser; and, when he
was taken from her, she drew much comfort from quiet chats about life and

death with the cottagers at Balmoral. Her piety, absolutelygenuine, found
what it wanted in the sober exhortations of old John Grant and the devout saws

of Mrs. P. Farquharson. They possessed the qualities, which, as a child of
fourteen, she had so sincerely admired in the Bishop of Chester's "Exposition

of the Gospel of St. Matthew;" they were "just plain and comprehensible and
full of truth and good feeling." The Queen, who gave her name to the Age of

Mill and of Darwin, never got any further than that.
From the social movements of her time Victoria was equallyremote. Towards the

smallest no less than towards the greatest changes she remained inflexible.
During her youth and middle age smoking had been forbidden in polite society,

and so long as she lived she would not withdraw her anathema against it. Kings
might protest; bishops and ambassadors, invited to Windsor, might be reduced,

in the privacy of their bedrooms, to lie full-length upon the floor and smoke
up the chimney--the interdict continued! It might have been supposed that a

female sovereign would have lent her countenance to one of the most vital of
all the reforms to which her epoch gave birth--the emancipation of women--but,

on the contrary, the mere mention of such a proposal sent the blood rushing to
her head. In 1870, her eye having fallen upon the report of a meeting in

favour of Women's Suffrage, she wrote to Mr. Martin in royal rage--"The Queen
is most anxious to enlisteveryone who can speak or write to join in checking