jewels of the crown on one hand, and his son, doomed to so sad an end, on the other. There were twenty-four sovereigns and heirs apparent, with their consorts, to right and left. The most bewitching elegance drew attention to the too material aspects of the pageant. There was a spirit of Jingo-Imperialism in the great hall in which the Emperor and Empress of the French received Europe and Asia. For the Sultan Abdul Azis, also blazing in diamonds, was present, with his ill-fated nephew, Mourad, and the Prince now known to the world as the Red Sultan. Rossini had composed a triumphant cantata, which was sung by the largest and most highly trained chorus ever heard in France, and by the first soli of the day. The jingoism was not so much expressed in words or air as in the cannon which were brought into the instrumental music. How inauspicious the miserable noise of these guns seemed to me! I thought of the proximity of the Capitol to the Tarpeian Rock. A few hours later all the Sovereigns, and Paris with them, learned that the prestige of the Emperor Napoleon was brought low by the execution at Meritaro of his protégé, the Emperor Maximilian. Mexico had braved the French Empire; a half-caste lawyer, Juarez, had tweaked the nose of Napoleon III. The beginning of the end was at hand. It took only three years from that triumphant day to clear away Imperial France and its jingoism.

The Diamond Jubilee, where I saw Queen Victoria for the last time, reminded me of that bright midsummer day. Not that I had any suspicion of the motives actuating those politicians who got up the show. Complicity with Rhodes did not betray itself. But it seemed to me in the nature of things that such a glorification of material power must be followed by a dark reverse, or even by an eclipse of that

power. It is dangerous for nations, as for individuals, to tempt Providence. The auspicious name of Victoria was used almost as an unholy spell. The real presence of Victoria was brought forward like a certain Egyptian god in the procession scene in "Aïda." She was to have been relegated, like that god, with other properties, to the lumber-room when the show was at an end. It was feared by the Rhodesian managers of the show that she would hamper their plan of campaign. The Diamond Jubilee, therefore, was to have been her last bow in public to the nation which she had ruled in peace and prosperity for sixty years. The Queen found the Boers troublesome, and thought them aggressive and hard to deal with. Still she clung with her strong sentiment and firm will, to the hope of peace in her time. She had seen so many dangerous crises surmounted without drawing the sword. Patience, soft words, and thorough preparation for the worst were what recommended themselves to her mind. She was the female Nestor of her time. Her words in council carried weight with them. This made her an obstacle to the strongest wing of the Government. It was determined to lead her to abdicate by suggesting through the Jingo Press a senile decay that rendered her unfit to discharge regal duties. A yellow morning paper, acting doubtless on a hint, spoke of her abdication as likely to be the closing act of the Diamond Jubilee. The nation-so it was put-could not grudge her the rest so well earned. It was Mr. Labouchere who, in Truth, called attention to this plan of campaign. The Queen put her foot down in a letter to her people. She declared her determination to devote herself to them to the last day of her life. This put an end at once to the rumors of abdication.

We have seen in the dark eighteen

She The

months that preceded the Queen's death how she kept her promise. rose to a sublime height of duty. good Queen became the grand Queen. In spite of painful and manifold infirmities, in spite of cruel family bereavements, in spite of a shrinking from harrowing sights and scenes, she did devote herself to her people. She came forward to show the nation a patriotic example. The Royal Widow, the representative widow of the world, herself welcomed the humble widows and wives of soldiers at the front at a friendly Christmas gathering in her palace. She herself endured bitter grief for the death of her second son, quickly following the death of his heir, which took place under peculiarly heartrending circumstances. She lost in the war a good, worthy grandson, who had honorably and honestly worked his way up to the rank of major, and had sought no favor, but applied himself to regimental duties. If not brilliant he was lovable and sterling. He was born and bred at Wind

sor.

Notwithstanding the Queen's propensity to mourn the dead in solitary grief, she felt she ought to be up and comforting the wounded. Those about her feared it might be too much for nerves that had been a good deal shaken. But go she would. She owed it to her soldiers to say kind words to them and herself to give them tokens of the sympathy and admiration she felt for men who had bravely fought for her and her Empire. Her sweet kindness prompted her to bring baskets of little nosegays, culled in the gardens of Osborne. ach man had his pretty, fragrant posy. "Be sure," said the Queen to her gardener, "that you gather flowers that have not more than come out and buds that are advanced. They will last some days. Also gather a sprig of some nicelyscented thing for each. A fragrant

bunch of flowers must be so grateful to a poor wounded man in a hospital." I have these words from the sister of one of the Queen's ladies, who heard her utter them. The same lady told me how it was the Queen's own idea, when she heard Lord Roberts had lost his son, to send for Lady Roberts and hand her the decoration intended for him. She subsequently said: "What grieves me most is that I cannot possibly do more. It would be so gratifying to me to be able to do more to sooth their grief." The same informant said to me last November: "Nobody could have believed the Queen able to make such efforts, and such sustained efforts. Were it not for her crippled state one might think the war, in rousing her, had cured her infirmities. She seems to have taken out a new lease of life. Her moral courage is amazing. We all shrink from opening letters and telegrams when we fear bad news. Every War Office telegram is brought at once to the Queen, and by her orders a secretary opens it and reads. The Queen often weeps and sobs in listening; but she listens to the end and does not miss one word."

Another instance of her courage was given in conquering her fear of being shot in Ireland. It was entirely her own idea to go there. She unexpectedly expressed it one morning at the breakfast table. The Princess Beatrice tried to dissuade her. All preparations had been made for a trip to the Riviera and she needed sunshine. Home Office and Dublin Castle reports were alarming. But the Queen thought it a sacred duty to go to Ireland, as "the grateful admirer of the Irish who had so bravely fought and fallen in South Africa." The conquest of her fear must have helped to exhaust her nervous force.

There is nothing more trying in old age than the persistent clinging to the consciousness of painful sensations.

They are not to be shaken off. Between sleeping and waking they haunt the mind, oppressing like a nightmare. The Queen must have had this experience before she visited Netley Hospital. It was more than brave to revisit the sick wards there. If her sight had not grown dim, she might not have been able to persevere. Much of what was shocking would be covered over. Yet she must have been fully alive to the horrors caused by war. She was near enough to every shattered invalid to realize his state, and had a word of tender sympathy. Only a high sense of duty, and a stubborn will could have enabled her to go on thus "devoting herself to the last moment of her life to her people." The Queen all her life showed moral courage in wishing to know the truth, whatever it might be. I am informed that after the breakdown of health began at Balmoral depressing and harrowing news was kept back or "toned down." She suspected that she was not kept thoroughly informed, and chafed. She required, she said, to be informed of everything. But, all but blind and crippled, she could not enforce utter obedience. She finally took the strong course of sending for Lord Roberts to hear from his lips the whole truth about the war. But she was very low when he came. A previous meeting with the Duchess of Colburg, who was fresh from Germany, with her mind full of sad family affairs, had depressed the Queen. Lord Roberts, may, perhaps, have recoiled from a full revelation. But whether he did or not, what he said was more than the aged Sovereign could bear.

I have mentioned above that I last saw the Queen at the Diamond Jubilee. But for a happy accident I should have missed seeing her. She was always a little bit of a woman, but age had further reduced her height and bowed her head, which for some years rested on her bosom, unless she made an effort

to hold it up. As the royal carriage approached the platform on which I sat, I was all attention. The Princess of Wales, in a mauve and silver robe, delicately refulgent as a Norse landscape in the midnight sun, sat, along with the Princess Christian, with her back to the horses. She looked happy as a fairy tale Princess at the end of the story, when virtue is freshly rewarded. And she deserved to be happy. She had secured a good dinner for the poor of London in honor of the Jubilee. Facing her was a white parasol, and what seemed to be a bundle of clothes. The bundle was quite shapeless; but one could discern in it a rich mantle of black figured velvet with a white ground. Could there be a wearer of the mantle? If there was she was huddled up. I felt provoked at the big white parasol, which was so held that one could not have a peep at the face behind it. One can see so much in a moment, when one is all eyes, as one can think so many thoughts in uttering a single short sentence in an improvised speech. A shade, I could perceive, passed over the thousands of faces, with eyes fixed on the parasol. It was like the shadow of a fleeting cloud on a ripe field of corn. Thought I: "To have come from Paris on purpose to see the Queen! It is too bad. Is it polite to all those good people to hide herself behind that parasol? We all know she is old. But there can be a beauty in old age when the face gives, in a few strong touches, the story of a well-spent life." As I thus mused, a slightly rude zephyr lifted the parasol, and held it back. The Queen was face to face with the multitude. Their eyes caught hers. There was mutual recognition, and then a thundering, hearty, affectionate cheer that rent the sky.

We saw a face there was no need for hiding. It was not lovely; no; but it was a goodly, kindly face, wrinkled

only about the eyes, the mouth and the chin; the cheeks had no longer the empurpled roseate of earlier years. There was a complexion that was due to breathing all a lifetime the purest air, The Contemporary Review.

drinking the best milk, keeping regular hours, and taking all the exercise consistent with weak limbs. Any one that day might have reasonably hoped the Queen would live to be a hundred. Emily Crawford.

The conventional pessimist, who so sadly deplores the degeneracy of our fin-de-siècle women, would delight in a work that has recently fallen into my hands. It dwells in sorrowful terms on the grievous habits of latter-day women. Listen to their talk-the perpetual use of some one cant epithet, constantly recurring and made to do duty for every variety of meaning. Then look at their frivolity-life one continual round of pleasure, while the home, once essentially a woman's sphere, knows her so little that she is obliged periodically to send round cards to her acquaintance announcing the unwonted event of her being "At Home." Like mother, like child. Even the little ones are being corrupted by their injudicious elders, kept up after midnight at babies' balls, "their little hearts beating with hopes about partners and fears about rivals." Yet what can we expect of an age that has produced the New Woman, the shrieking sisterhood who talk about their rights? -rights, forsooth, when it was duties their grandmothers thought of. The very literature reflects the taste of the day-corrupt and vicious; yet how expect virtue or morality from an age that reads "La Nouvelle Héloïse" and "Die Räuber."

Yes, such was the terrible state of society at the end of last century, when Hannah More dipped her pen in bitterness to attack the advanced wom

en of her day, "the bold and independent beauty, the intrepid female, the hoyden, the huntress and the archer, the swinging arms, the confident address, the regimental and the four-inhand." To those who are accustomed to look on the eighteenth century as the period of powder, patches and politeness, these accusations seem very startling. It is so easy to forget that, though fashions change, human nature does not, and therefore the same types are bound to recur, though in different garb. Doubtless the progressive thinkers of Hannah More's day spoke of the nineteenth century in the same tones of ardent hope with which we talk of the twentieth. The nervous, hysterical woman had vanished, this lady assures us, before the advent of "mannishness;" the neurotic woman was temporarily out of favor.

sensibility, who must not by any trick of language be confounded with the sensible woman, still held the stage. Her nerves, her hysterics, her faintings in the hero's arms, her abundant tears dried with lace-edged handkerchiefs, her inevitable smelling-salts and frantic flights to her own chamber-how familiar they are! She glories in this ultra-sensibility.

"You urge me to think," writes Julia, in Miss Edgeworth's Letters to Literary Ladies; "I profess only to feel. Yes," she continues, "if at this instant my guardian genius were to appear before me, and offer me the choice of my future destiny: on the one hand, the even temper, the poised judgment, the stoical serenity of philosophy; on the other, the eager genius. the exquisite sensibility of enthusiasm; if the angel said to me: 'Choose -the lot of the one is great pleasure and great pain, great virtues and great defects, ardent hopes and severe disappointments, ecstasy and despair; the lot of the other is calm happiness unmixed with violent grief, virtue without heroism, respect without admiration, and a length of life in which to every moment is allotted its proper portion of felicity;' Gracious genius, I should exclaim, if half my existence must be the sacrifice, take it; enthusiasm is my choice."

Of this kind of sensibility Miss Austen's genius has made Marianne, in "Sense and Sensibility," the type for all time. Violent in her affection and her hatred, determined to appear miserable when she feels so, and with all that loving and lovable, we lose patience with her at times, and yet find her far more to our mind than her contemporaries, the silly flirts who are always giggling and whispering about their beaux, the slangy women, to whom everything is either "vastly entertaining" or "quite shocking," or the horsy Lady Di Spankers, who played so important a part in fiction. Very real figures are they all, drawn in pre

impressionist days, clear-cut portraits that will survive many of our shadowy modern heroines. They rise before us, living women of flesh and blood, to describe to us the fashions and ideals of their day.

The special characteristic of English ladies at the turn of the century seems to have been their uselessness. Work was menial and degrading; to earn a living a disgrace. A man who worked might be "respectable," but he had a better claim to admiration if he spent somebody else's money, and got gloriously into debt. Miss Austen supplies numerous instances of this type. Edward Ferrars, in "Sense and Sensibility," who depends for a subsistence on a capricious mother, and may neither determine his own actions nor choose his own wife, is yet considered worthy to win Elinor the Sensible. In the case of Willoughby the False, it is an alleviation rather than an aggravation of his misdeeds that he is dependent on the good will of a certain old lady. Frank Churchill, in "Emma," is another of the handsome young men who live by flattering old ladies while making sport of young ones. A rare exception is Edward Bertram, in "Mansfield Park," but his virtue is almost excessive. He actually determines to live at his parsonage and do his duty to his parishioners for the pittance of £700 a year. In spite of this heroic self-denial, he is keenly alive to the value of a competence. "I do not mean to be poor," he says. "Poverty is exactly what I have determined against. Honesty, in the something between, in the middle state of worldly circumstances, is all that I am anxious for your not looking down on." To which Mary Crawford, who loves him, though not well enough to take such a step down in the social scale, retorts, "You ought to be in Parliament, or you should have gone into the army ten years ago."