[Sidenote: FIRST VISIT TO SCOTLAND.]

For some time the Queen was understood to have contemplated a journey to the land of those Stuart ancestors by virtue of whose Tudor blood they, and the Brunswick line through them, and she through it, inherited the British crown. In the autumn of this year all seemed propitious for the journey, and it was undertaken accordingly by herself and her young husband. Their first destination was the Scottish capital, and as the railway system connecting the southern and northern extremities of the island was yet far from complete, the journey was made by water from the Thames to the Forth, the port of embarkation being Woolwich, and of debarkation, Granton, a minor harbour in the immediate neighbourhood of Edinburgh.

The expected visit was awaited and prepared for in the North with the utmost eagerness of expectancy. Half Scotland seemed to have emptied itself into the metropolis to do her honour. In their preparations, burgher vied with n.o.ble, tartan-clad Highlanders with Lowlanders in their more sombre blue bonnets and hodden grey. On the 29th of August, the Queen left Windsor, and proceeded to Woolwich, where she embarked amid the acclamations of her metropolitan and Kentish subjects at an early hour of the same day. In a Royal yacht, towed by a steam ship of war, the voyage was safely effected in the fine weather and on the placid wave of early autumn. In due time the Royal squadron arrived off Dunbar, which, with the Ba.s.s Rock and Tantallon Castle, form together a fine _coup-d'oeil_ of romantic coast scenery and middle age antiquity, at the mouth of the Firth of Forth. Here it was met by large steamers filled by welcomers from Edinburgh and its neighbourhood, who greeted their ill.u.s.trious visitors with loud huzzahs, and the strains of that National Anthem, which, though of English birth, was chaunted right l.u.s.tily by Scottish lungs and lips.

It was observed that Her Majesty, who came on board and acknowledged the vivas of her subjects, had paid the Scots the compliment of enveloping herself in a Paisley shawl; and when, a day or two later, she made her formal entry past the church sanctified by the preaching of John Knox, to the Castle, in a narrow chamber of which her unfortunate ancestor Queen Mary bore her son King James, she wore, with even more conspicuously appropriate taste, a shawl of Stuart tartan.

[Sidenote: LANDING ON SCOTTISH SOIL.]

As she pa.s.sed up the Firth, under cover of the gathering night, every peak on either side of the estuary, from St. Abb's Head, which she had left behind, away westwards to the Pentlands, the Lomonds, and the Ochils, was surmounted by a blazing beacon--a splendid sight, and stimulative by contrast to the imaginations of those who recollected to what different uses beacon-fires on Scottish hills and Scottish Border Keeps had been put in earlier days of the international relations of England and Scotland.

The fiery welcome was returned from the Royal yacht, by the letting off of rockets, and the burning of blue lights.

At last the squadron came in sight in the roads before Leith, the anchor being let down--"a welcome sound," wrote the Queen--at a quarter to one o'clock on the morning of Thursday, September the 1st. Every one of the heights on or under the domination of which Edinburgh stands, had been crowded all the previous day with tens of thousands of spectators. All at once two guns from the castle, and a signal flag hoisted from the summit of Nelson's column, some 400 feet above the level of the sea, announced the arrival. The Queen slept and rested herself after the fatigues of her voyage on board the Royal yacht; and she took her good but inalert subjects by surprise, by effecting her landing at an hour so early on the succeeding morning, that many of them, wearied by their recent vigils, had not yet left their couches, and even the corporate dignitaries were subject to the mortification of not having the honour to receive and welcome their Queen as her foot first touched Scottish soil. In their absence, that pleasurable duty was discharged by Sir Robert Peel, and the Duke of Buccleuch, whose guest she was about to be at his palace of Dalkeith, and who had ridden immediately after her carriage, as Captain-General of her body-guard of Scottish Archers, on the day on which she was crowned queen at Westminster. Sir Robert Peel told the Queen that the people were all in the highest glee and good humour, though a little disappointed at the non-arrival of the squadron the day before, as had been expected.

With the extraordinarily auspicious fatality which has made "Queen's weather" so trite and proverbial an expression, the sun splendidly burst forth at the moment of her landing, and continued to shine throughout her progress through a portion of the New Town of Edinburgh; its bright freestone streets and terraces sparkling in the clear, sunlit air--past her ancient Palace of Holyrood, and so through fertile Lothian to the mansion of the princely head of the old Border House of the Scotts. When the customary ensign was hauled down from the top of the rugged Castle Rock, and the Royal Standard was hoisted in its place, the streets at once filled, and the loyal shouts of the crowds, who hastily a.s.sembled in no small force, sufficiently atoned for the absence of those whom the somewhat unexpected arrival balked for this one day of the delight of expressing their devotion.

[Sidenote: FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF SCOTLAND.]

The impression which her first view of Edinburgh made upon the Queen was very striking and most favourable. She thought it "beautiful, totally unlike anything else she had seen." Even Prince Albert, a great traveller while yet in his teens, and who had visited very many great and renowned cities, also said it was unlike anything which he had witnessed. The ma.s.sive stone buildings, with not a solitary brick used in their construction; the great dorsal fin of the High Street; the magnificent situation of the Castle; the Calton Hill, guarded by mediaeval battlements and crowned by Choragic temples, with the n.o.ble back-ground of Arthur's Seat overtopping the whole, together impressed the youthful tourists as "forming altogether a splendid spectacle."

As the carriages drove through the city, the Earl of Wemyss, who marched by the Queen's side in his green uniform of a Scottish Archer of the Guard, pointed out to Her Majesty the varied objects of interest on the line of route through the eastern portions of the city to the Duke of Buccleuch's palace of Dalkeith. When they got into the open country, she was further astonished to find that not only all the cottages, but even the fences dividing field from field, were also built of stone. The peasants by the wayside were equally objects of curiosity and interest, as they had "quite a different character from England and the English." The close caps--_Scottice_, "mutches"--of the old women, and the long, flowing hair, frequently red, of the handsome girls and children, were equal novelties to the royal "Southrons." The Prince was struck with the resemblance of the country people to Germans. Other Scottish specialties appeared at the breakfast-table at Dalkeith, in the form of oatmeal porridge and "Finnan Haddies"--the first of which, at least, found immediate favour with Her Majesty.

The grand ceremonial of entering the ancient city in state was reserved for the Sat.u.r.day after the arrival; the interval having been devoted by the royal party to quiet and repose in the magnificent domain of Buccleuch, and drives to objects of interest in its neighbourhood. The line of the cavalcade, on this red-letter day, was up the steep ascent of the Canongate, High Street, and Lawnmarket, from the Palace of Holyrood (which the Queen rightly p.r.o.nounced "a royal-looking old place") to the Castle which the Black Douglas scaled, where George Buchanan's pedantic Stuart pupil was born, and from the parapets of which various and shifting prospects are to be descried, which may be equalled, but cannot be surpa.s.sed, in any portion of Her Majesty's dominions.

[Sidenote: THE QUEEN IN EDINBURGH CASTLE.]

It was indeed historic ground along which the Queen pa.s.sed this day. Every one of the stupendous houses of eight, ten, or even more stories, which formed a mighty avenue of stone on either side of the ancient causeway along which the steeds which drew her carriage slowly and deliberately proceeded, had some tale of long gone days to tell, many of them being most intimately a.s.sociated with the fortunes of her Stuart ancestors. On her way she pa.s.sed the site of that tower in which Darnley, her ancestor, was blown into eternity. Ere she left her Palace of Holyrood and the adjacent ruins of the abbey which was erected by that Scottish king who built and endowed so many abbeys that his subjects piteously exclaimed that he was a "saur saunt for the Croon," she may have seen the blood-stains of Rizzio, and the somewhat mythical portraits of the Kings of the Houses of Kenneth, Bruce, and the Stuarts. On one side of her was the old mansion of the Regent Moray, on the other the spot where, for the first and only time, the boy Francis Jeffrey set eyes upon Robert Burns.

Here was the ancient oaken hall where the Scottish Parliament sate, there the office of that Scottish journal of which Daniel Defoe, the staunch and loyal friend of William III., was the first editor. Here was the house in which John Knox lived and died, there the church in which he preached with such fervour for that Protestant faith, with the establishment of which in Europe both lines of her ancestors were so intimately identified. And when she arrived on the esplanade of the Castle itself, she could look across the Forth on the one side to the minor mountain which casts its morning shadow into Loch Leven, from her captivity on an islet of which Scottish Catholic gentlemen so gallantly rescued her Stuart ancestress; while immediately beneath her lay the Gra.s.smarket--at once the Tower and the Smithfield of Scotland--where Montrose and Argyll expiated respectively their loyalty to the Stuart race, and to freedom of soul and speech.

As the cortege pa.s.sed up the streets along which Prince Charlie had pa.s.sed when he held court at Holyrood just ninety-seven years before, as she received at the site of the old Tolbooth the keys of the city from the Lord Provost, bending the knee beside his fellow-burghers, clad in the old costumes of the Trades, and close beside a guard of honour of Highlanders headed by the present Duke of Argyll; or as she stood surveying from the topmost battery of the citadel her fair ancestral domains of Lothian and Fife, and the distant mountains which tower o'er Loch Lomond and the Trossachs, some such proud and pathetic recollections as these must have occupied and touched the heart of the youngest and the mightiest monarch in Europe. Their closer acquaintance with Edinburgh increased the mingled amazement and delight of the Queen and Prince. Prince Albert p.r.o.nounced the view of it from the margin of the Firth of Forth as "fairy-like,"

"what you would imagine as a thing to dream of, or to see in a picture."

He said he felt sure the Acropolis could not be finer, and the Queen at once recognised the appropriateness of the idealised metamorphosis of "Auld Reekie" (_Anglice_, "Old Smoky") into "the Modern Athens." The Leith ticket-porters, mounted on flower-decked horses, with broad, ribbon-decorated Kilmarnock bonnets, and the pretty Newhaven fishwives, with their clear, peachy complexions and Danish costumes, were objects of peculiar interest.

[Sidenote: THE QUEEN IN THE HIGHLANDS.]

s.p.a.ce fails us to enter into details of the further incidents of this, the Queen's first visit to her Scottish dominion. Enough to say that she received in the Highlands, where she visited in succession not a few of her oldest n.o.bles of Gaelic and Norman descent, receptions as rapturous as that which she experienced in the Modern Athens. The welcome, if it could not be more hearty, was at least attended with more picturesque accessories in the romantic region where the dialect and the "garb of Old Gael" still to a large extent prevail. At Dupplin Castle, at Scone Palace, where her ancestors were crowned, at Blair Athole, at Taymouth, and at Drummond Castle, she was entertained with equal splendour, and with the true and special elements of "Highland Welcome." She may be almost said to have pa.s.sed through a continuous succession of triumphal arches. Every chieftain brought out all his available clansmen, all in kilts, claymores, and Glengarry bonnets, to act as guards of honour. b.a.l.l.s, in which the national dances, performed by the best born cadets of the n.o.ble houses of whom she was the guest, const.i.tuted the chief feature, alternated with deer-stalking, for the especial behoof of the Prince; processions of boats on the lake through which rolls the Tay, a river only less rapid than the Spey; and visits to places of historic interest or romantic beauty.

The Queen was especially charmed with the beautiful situation of the ancient city of Perth, and the enthusiastic reception which the mult.i.tudes there a.s.sembled gave to her. Prince Albert, too, was delighted, and likened the appearance of the place to Basle. At Scone Palace, which is within two miles of Perth, a very natural object of peculiar interest was the mound on which all the Scottish kings had been crowned. At Dunkeld the Highlands were fairly entered; and here the Royal party were met and escorted by a guard of Athole Highlanders, armed with halberts, and headed by a piper. One of them danced the sword dance, with which the travellers were greatly amused, and others of them figured in a reel.

The longest sojourn made in the Highlands was at Taymouth, the seat of the Marquis of Breadalbane. The scenery here again revived recollections of Switzerland in the memory of Prince Albert, who was particularly p.r.o.ne, in this and subsequent visits to the North, to trace resemblances between its scenery and localities which he had visited in the tours of his bachelor days. The reception at Taymouth was magnificent, and quite captivated the ill.u.s.trious guests. The Queen wrote in her journal--

The _coup d'oeil_ was indescribable. There were a number of Lord Breadalbane's Highlanders, all in the Campbell tartan, drawn up in front of the house, with Lord Breadalbane himself in a Highland dress at their head; a few of Sir Niel Menzies' men (in the Menzies red and white tartan), a number of pipers playing, and a company of the 92nd Highlanders, also in kilts. The firing of the guns, the cheering of the great crowd, the picturesqueness of the dresses, the beauty of the surrounding country, with its rich back-ground of wooded hills, altogether formed one of the finest scenes imaginable. It seemed as if a great chieftain in olden feudal times was receiving his Sovereign.

It was princely and romantic.

Wherever the Queen rambled during her stay by the sh.o.r.es of Loch Tay, she was guarded by two Highlanders, and it recalled to her mind "olden times, to see them with their swords drawn." Walking one day with the d.u.c.h.ess of Norfolk, the Queen and her n.o.ble companion met "a fat, good-humoured little woman." She cut some flowers for the ladies, and the d.u.c.h.ess handed to her some money, saying, "From Her Majesty." The poor woman was perfectly astounded, but, recovering her wits, came up to the Queen, and said navely that "her people were delighted to see the Queen in Scotland." Wherever the royal visitors were, or went, the inevitable strains of the bagpipes were heard. They played before the Castle at frequent intervals throughout the day, from breakfast till dinner-time, and invariably when they went in or out of doors. When rowed in boats on the lake, two pipers sat in the bows and played; and the Queen, who had grown "quite fond" of the bagpipes, was reminded of the lines of Scott, with whose poems she had, from an early age, possessed the most intimate familiarity:--

"See the proud pipers in the bow, And mark the gaudy streamers flow From their loud chambers down, and sweep The furrow'd bosom of the deep, As, rushing through the lake amain, They plied the ancient Highland strain."

[Sidenote: DEPARTURE FROM SCOTLAND.]

On the 13th of September the return journey from the Highlands by Stirling, the ancient Castle of which was visited, to Dalkeith Palace, had been completed. Two days later the Queen and Prince re-embarked at Granton, _en route_ for Woolwich and Windsor.

Although a by no means excessive quant.i.ty of time--but a fortnight--was consumed in the tour, some idea of the rapidity with which distances were traversed, and the extent of ground covered, may be gathered from the fact that no fewer than 656 post-horses were employed. The Queen touched the hearts of the Highlanders--among whom Jacobitism remained, not as an element of personal devotion to a fallen house, but not the less as a deep chord of pathos and poetry--by commanding a Scottish vocalist, at a concert given in her honour at Blair Athole, to sing two of the most beloved of Jacobite songs--"Cam' ye by Athole," and "Wae's me for Prince Charlie." When she once more embarked at Granton on her homeward route, she left memories of pleasure and affection which far exceeded the intensely ardent excitement which had preceded and greeted her landing. On the last day which she spent in Scotland, the Queen wrote in her journal--"This is our last day in Scotland; it is really a delightful country, and I am very sorry to leave it." And the day after, watching its vanishing coast--"As the fair sh.o.r.es of Scotland receded more and more from our view, we felt quite sad that this very pleasant and interesting tour was over; but we shall never forget it."

CHAPTER XVI.

WHAT ENGLAND OWES TO PRINCE ALBERT.

The Prince's Study of our Laws and Const.i.tution--Two Misconceptions Outlived--His Versatility--First Speech an Anti-Slavery One--His Appreciation and Judicious Criticism of Art--Scientific Side of his Mind--As an Agriculturist.

It will not be undesirable at this stage of our narrative to interpose a summary compendium of some indications of the manner in which Prince Albert, or the "Prince Consort," as he was designated by Royal Letters Patent, after 1857, discharged the high, onerous, and important duties to which his position called him. If the conduct and career of a husband be an integral and large part of a woman's life, it is tenfold more so in the case of a woman who is also a queen, and especially a queen-regnant in and by her own right. The large and enlarging breadth of mind which the Prince soon began to display; the abundant tenderness of heart, which found at once indication and exercise in the admirable and diverse modes in which he advanced all agencies of public utility and a.s.sociated benevolence; the excellent mode in which, equally as a father and a husband, he evinced the warm glow of domestic virtue which animated his bosom, and the absolute and much-wanted scientific and artistic lessons which he taught more than any other man, during his life in England, to the somewhat uncouth people of whom he became a part--all these, and other elements of character and conduct, indirectly increased the growing esteem in which the Queen was held, on her own merits, by her people; for we might have had to look forward to a different national future, so far as a national future can be moulded in the sense of either making or marring, had the "father of our future kings" been other and lesser than what he was. Such a man as the Prince Consort must necessarily have wielded a very large and weighty influence upon the character of the royal lady whom he married. The history of her life, therefore, even if it were traced within narrower limits than those within whose compression our task must be discharged, would be insufficiently delineated without the introduction of such episodical but most relevant matter as that to which this chapter is briefly dedicated.

Almost the first task which the Prince Consort undertook when he came amongst us was to set himself to an a.s.siduous study of our laws and inst.i.tutions. He secured the services of a most competent instructor in themes so important to one who stood so near the throne, in the person of the late Mr. William Selwyn, Q.C. Mr. Selwyn was a sound jurist, and under his guidance the Prince read such works as Blackstone, De Lolme, Hallam, Bentham, and Mill. He proved himself an apt student, for he had the capacity for study eminently developed; and, besides, his position was one of singular difficulty and delicacy. He stood so near to the throne, amongst a people, too, traditionally jealous of aliens, and especially of aliens in high places, that any utterance he might be called upon to make would be considered as almost, if not quite, emanating from the throne itself. Although a certain cabinet intrigue, and one rare expression of his own--not so much unguarded in itself, as wanting in explicitness, and capable of a certain misconstruction--did, on two several occasions, provoke in certain quarters something approaching to national disfavour, he soon outlived the misconception; and the universal sentiment of the people came round to the conviction that the Prince was faithful and loyal to the const.i.tution to which he had sworn fidelity; nay more, that he had fairly caught, apprehended, and absorbed into his being the very genius and spirit of the English race.

[Sidenote: PRINCE ALBERT S FIRST SPEECH.]

The first speech the Prince made in England was at an anti-slavery meeting; the last at the opening of an international statistical congress.

The former was delivered during the first summer of his married life. It is so brief, and it gives, as it were, so thoroughly the key-note of his character, that our readers will thank us for giving it entire:--

I have been induced to preside at the meeting of this society from a conviction of its paramount importance to the great interests of humanity and justice. I deeply regret that the benevolent and persevering exertions of England to abolish that atrocious traffic in human beings (at once the desolation of Africa and the blackest stain upon civilised Europe) have not as yet led to any satisfactory conclusion. But I sincerely trust that this great country will not relax in its efforts until it has finally, and for ever, put an end to a state of things so repugnant to the spirit of Christianity and the best feelings of our nature. Let us, therefore, trust that Providence will prosper our exertions in so holy a cause, and that (under the auspices of our Queen and her Government) we may, at no distant period, be rewarded by the accomplishment of the great and humane object for the promotion of which we have this day met.

We have already remarked the wide range of Prince Albert's endeavours, study, devotion, and consequent usefulness. He presided at dinners of the Literary Fund, and of the Royal Academy; at the Trinity House most frequently, and at many agricultural meetings. Two of the best and most pregnant with good of his addresses, were delivered at the meetings of a.s.sociations designed respectively for the better housing of labourers, and in behalf of the large and sorely tempted cla.s.s of domestic servants.

Now he presided at the Bicentenary of the Corporation of the Sons of the Clergy; again at the two hundredth anniversary of one of our most ill.u.s.trious regiments of Foot Guards. On art, as all were prepared to expect, he delivered ripe words of wisdom at the Royal Academy in Trafalgar Square, and in laying the foundation in the capital of his wife's Stuart ancestors of a new National Gallery for her Scottish subjects. Against the expectation, and to the loudly expressed surprise of all, save those who knew him thoroughly, he made a most admirable survey of the sciences and their uses, at one of the last meetings held ere his death, of the British a.s.sociation for the Advancement of Science. Of art he was a judicious critic, as well as a munificent patron. It was at his special wish and option that the _savant_ Lyon Playfair was made one of his Equerries; and that a residence in Hampton Court Palace was put at the disposal of Michael Faraday.

How much of mingled love for art and artists, and at the same time of criticism most kindly and sagacious, is to be found in these brief sentences, extracted from his great speech at the Royal Academy dinner:--

An unkind word of criticism pa.s.ses like a cold blast over their tender shoots, and shrivels them up, checking the flow of the sap, which was rising to produce, perhaps, mult.i.tudes of flowers and fruits. But still criticism is absolutely necessary to the development of art, and the injudicious praise of an inferior work becomes an insult to superior genius. In this respect, our times are peculiarly favourable when compared with those when Madonnas were painted in the seclusion of convents; for we have now on the one hand the eager compet.i.tion of a vast array of artists of every degree of talent and skill, and on the other, as judge, a great public, for the greater part wholly uneducated in art, and thus led by professional writers who often strive to impress the public with a great idea of their own artistic knowledge, by the merciless manner in which they treat works which cost those who produced them the highest efforts of mind or feeling.

And again, as a companion and worthy picture--which is none the less, but all the more, worthy of hanging along with that we have just presented, that the great truth it teaches is presented with such lucid simplicity--take these sentences explanatory of the scope and end of such inst.i.tutions as the British a.s.sociation for the Advancement of Science, delivered by him as its President, at the 1859 Congress at Aberdeen:--

[Sidenote: THE PRINCE'S EULOGY ON HUMBOLDT.]

If the activity of this a.s.sociation ever found, or could find its personification in one individual--its incarnation as it were--this had been found in that distinguished and revered philosopher who has been removed from amongst us in his ninetieth year, within the last few months. Alexander Von Humboldt ever strove after dominion over that universality of human knowledge which stands in need of thoughtful government and direction to preserve its integrity. He strove to tie up the fasces of scientific knowledge, to give them strength in unity. He treated all scientific men as members of one family, enthusiastically directing, fostering, and encouraging inquiry, where he saw either the want of or the willingness for it.

His protection of the young and ardent student led many to success in their pursuits. His personal influence with the courts and governments of most countries in Europe, enabled him to plead the cause of science in a manner which made it more difficult to refuse than to grant what he requested. All lovers of Science deeply mourn for the loss of such a man. Gentlemen, it is a singular coincidence, that this very day on which we are here a.s.sembled, and are thus giving expression to our admiration of him, should be the anniversary of his birth.

The Queen, who was staying at Balmoral, was very anxious about the manner in which her husband should pa.s.s the very severe ordeal of delivering an address to the a.s.sembled men of science. She recorded her high gratification at learning by telegram that "Albert's reception was admirable, and that all was going off as well as possible. Thank G.o.d!" She invited the _savans_, to a fete at her Highland home; they accepted the invitation in great numbers; and "the philosophers," of whom Her Majesty was not a little, and rather comically, afraid, were not only entertained with creature comforts, but the somewhat novel combination was presented of Owen, Brewster, Sabine, and Murchison, with their brethren of lesser renown, standing as spectators of contests of strength between athletes of the Grant, Farquharson, Duff, and other clans. Some of the more distinguished guests remained over night, and at dinner they rejoiced the Queen's heart by "speaking in very high terms of my beloved Albert's speech, the good it had done, and the general satisfaction it had caused."

[Sidenote: THE PRINCE AS AN AGRICULTURIST.]

Probably the capacity of all others in which the Prince became most generally familiar to the nation, was that of a practical, improving, scientific agriculturist; and we use this word in its twofold sense, as embracing the growing of crops and the rearing of live stock. Almost from the outset of his career amongst us he commenced a series of scientific agricultural experiments on the farms in Windsor Park. He renovated the agriculture of the Park, as much as he confessedly did its landscape gardening. He became a constant and most successful exhibitor of live domestic edible animals at the great agricultural shows; his example in this field having been followed since his death, to the great gratification of the agricultural interest, both by his widow and his eldest son; and, especially in the case of Her Majesty, with marked success. As a high and eminent authority on the subject has admirably put it--

His was no merely idle, pa.s.sing patronage or casual aid, but it was rather a pursuit he delighted in, and one he followed out with equal energy and advantage. The most practical man could not go that pleasant round from the Flemish farm to the Norfolk, and so back again by the Home and the Dairy, without learning something wherever he went.

We must deny ourselves the pleasure of aught but pa.s.sing reference to the admirable manner in which he discharged his academic duties as Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, which post he held from 1845 till his death, and about which we say enough when we remind or inform the reader that it was such men as Professor Sedgwick, the Vice-chancellor, who spoke of the exercise of his duties in this capacity in terms of the highest honour and estimation. Similar were his services to such n.o.ble inst.i.tutions as Eton and Wellington Colleges, in both of which he offered prizes expressly calculated to encourage the pursuit of those studies which had been, or were most likely to be, ignored in their several cases.

Horticulture, art exhibitions, the National Portrait Gallery, the Society of Arts, societies for improving the general condition and the housing of the labouring cla.s.ses, mechanics' inst.i.tutions--each of these const.i.tutes a theme most pregnant and suggestive in connection with the Prince's name and memory. But we can do no more than recite and dismiss the bald catalogue of topics. Reserving for the appropriate chronological occasion some brief remarks upon the character of the Prince as a private man, as contrasted with his aspects of character as a citizen and public benefactor, to which we have at present confined ourselves, we feel that we cannot better conclude than by condensing his opinions delivered in an address to the annual meeting of the Servants' Provident Benevolent Society, in 1849, in which the whole plan and doctrine by which he believed all really useful a.s.sociated benevolence ought to be regulated was summed up. His view was that no such organisation was founded upon a right principle which did not require every man, by personal exertion, and by his own choice, to work out his own happiness. Benevolence he held to be not really such unless it stimulated providence, self-denial, and perseverance. He used special words of warning against those so frequent lotteries of uncertain and precarious advantages--"really a species of gambling"--expensive convivial meetings, balloting for prizes, and electioneering contests on a small scale. "Let them always bear in mind,"