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QUEEN VICTORIA.

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See illustration on front page. HE life and character of Queen Victoria are as well known as any woman's can be. Her own writings reveal her tastes, modes of thought, and also her prejudices. Mrs. Oliphant's sympathetic Life gives the chief events that have marked her career from the days "of her sad childhood"to quote the Queen's own words -to her sadder widowhood. Born in 1819, she attained her majority as heir to the throne on her eighteenth birthday, May 24, 1837. On the 20th of June following King William died. His death took place at two o'clock in the morning, and at five o'clock the Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Conyngham aroused the inmates of Kensington Palace, and demanded to see the Queen. She came down at once, in her night dress and dressing-gown, with slippers on her bare feet. Lord Conyngham began, "Your Majesty-" when she stopped him, and held out her hand for him to kiss. knelt and kissed it, and then told the news. The same day, at eleven in the morning, the Privy Council assembled. death of the King was officially announced, and the two Archbishops, the Chancellor and Prime-Minister, and the two royal Dukes, were sent to inform the new sovereign. They returned to the council-room, then the doors were flung open, and the Queen entered alone. She bowed, took her seat, and read her speech in a clear, distinct, and audible voice, without fear or embarrassment. The only sign of emotion she displayed was when her uncles did her homage, and then, as these two old men knelt before her, she blushed up to her eyes. She spoke to no one, and made no distinction in manner toward age, rank, or party. She was dressed plainly in black, and surprised all those who were present by her dignity, calmness, and self-possession. "Her stature," says the cynical Greville, "was quite forgotten in the majesty and gracefulness of her demeanor." Peel expressed himself as amazed at her man-" ner and behavior, her deep sense of her situation, her modesty and firmness. The Duke of Wellington frankly exclaimed, "If she had been my own daughter, she could not have done better!"

The next day she presided at a council as if she had been doing nothing else all her life. In those days she was a short, slim girl, her light hair brought down. in bandeaux on her temples, and then coiled back over the ears,

QUEEN VICTORIA, 1836.-FROM THE PAINTING BY SIR WILLIAM HAYTER.

as she is represented in the portrait by Sir William Hayter. In another portrait of the same period she is pictured with a huge coal-scuttle bonnet on her head and a black silk scarf over her shoulders. Her first, best friend was the last man in the world one would have picked out for an adviser to a young and inexperienced girl-the skeptical, profligate, careless Melbourne. Yet when he resigned his office as PrimeMinister his value was felt even by his opponents, and the Duke of Wellington, who formed the next ministry, remarked: "I do not know what we can do with her. Peel has no manner, and I have no small-talk." The Queen perhaps may compare the manners and small-talk of today with those of 1837, with some regret for the old time. She has, however, seen greater changes than those of either manner or dress. Her reign is pre-eminently the reign of the development of practical inventions. In 1837 there was no railroad to Brighton, and Sir Vincent Cotter drove one of the coaches. There was no railway between London and Birming ham, and an engineer on the Manchester and Birmingham

line was dismissed because he had run at the rate of fortyfive miles an hour. In 1836 the learned Dr. Dion. Lardner had demonstrated that no steam-ship could possibly cross the Atlantic; the keel of the Royal Sovereign was not laid down till 1838, and songs of triumph were sung when she made the passage in fourteen days and six hours. It was not till 1839 that any start was made in photography. Daguerre had stated that it required eight hours to take a landscape, while a single object, strongly lighted, might be taken in three hours, and when the time of exposure was reduced to half an hour, perfection was thought to be obtained. The telegraph of 1837 was still the old semaphore, that looked like a centipede in convulsions standing on its head. Petroleum was a quack medicine, called "American oil." John Doyle, whose signature was H. B., was the leading caricaturist, and Punch was unknown. The population of the United Kingdom was about twenty-six millions: now it is thirty-seven millions. Keats, Byron, Shelley, were dead, Wordsworth silent; Scott had worked himself to death, and the Pickwick Papers were just begun. The Victorian poets were still unfledged, and no one could have foretold the schools of philosophy and history or the immense development of science which her reign has witnessed.

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