As for Brougham, when office was suggested again to him, he shook his head, saying that now he was getting old, and he had nothing left for which to live; but he showed great activity still in the cause of law reform, and took great interest in the Social Science Association. He died at Cannes in 1868, at the age of ninety.

Lord Melbourne died twenty years earlier. He had refused all honours several times, begging the Queen not to press her intention of bestowing the Garter upon him. It was enough that he had lived honourably and done his duty, he said. His character was once summed up in the following couplet:—

“For a patriot too cool, for a drudge disobedient,

And too fond of the right to pursue the expedient.”

But as in his youth he had never sought favour, so in his age no one sought favour from him. The stirring world in which he had always lived had something more to do than to trouble about an old and ailing man, and he laboured under a sense of neglect, chafing daily at the indifference which was shown him by those who for years had pressed their friendship upon him. In real fact he was suffering from his lonely state; neither wife nor child was there to give him company, and his only two relatives seem to have been his sister, Lady Palmerston, and his brother. In happier domestic circumstances his end would have been happier and his sorrows non-existent. In November, 1848, he had another attack of illness, and died in unconsciousness at the age of seventy. He was a very remarkable man, more perhaps from his extreme honesty in a difficult position than for his great attainments, though those were sufficiently noteworthy. He was the most lovable man who had moved in the Queen’s circle, one who would never wittingly commit an injustice to anybody. When he was dead a letter from him was handed to his brother, in which he left a command that a certain sum of money should be given to Mrs. Norton, to help to some extent to show his sorrow for the trouble which his thoughtless friendship had brought her; and in this he solemnly declared that she and he were innocent of all evil in that friendship.

Queen Victoria was now, in a sense, in calm waters; she was happy domestically, she adored her husband, and in spite of her protest had a large family of children; the terrible leakage in her income, which had at one time threatened her with disastrous debt, had been stopped, and she was growing rich, though she was never so rich as the malcontents would have liked to believe, and did in many cases believe. George Anson told Greville in 1847 that the Queen’s affairs were so well managed that she would be able to provide for the expenses of Osborne out of her income, and those expenses would be £200,000. He also said that the Prince of Wales would not have less than £70,000 a year from his Duchy of Cornwall, and £100,000 had already been saved from it.

Though the Queen retained for a long time her Whiggish sympathies, she was now well on the road to strict Toryism, to the end of her life showing especial favour to her Conservative leaders, and more or less ignoring their rivals. This was caused more by the difference in their views upon foreign affairs than by her sentiments on home politics, and also by her keen sense of the dignity of the Crown. Though when displeased the Tories had shown themselves capable of dragging that dignity through the mire, yet when they were pleased they paid it all lip-service and outward homage. The Whigs, on the other hand, though inclined to take Royal disfavour with more equanimity, were also inclined to question the doings of Royalty in a calmer and, therefore from her point of view, more deadly way. When the party in power changed from time to time, she parted from Russell in anger, from Gladstone in coldness, from Aberdeen—whom she had detested on her accession—with a pang, and from Disraeli in deep dejection. It is the whirligig of time exemplified in the mind of a woman.

She had great Ministers to advise her in her work, but she was also a great Queen, for though she was no genius and had no surpassing intellect, she never shirked, she worked step by step through every difficulty, she was essentially a climber, and when more talented people might have given up she went bravely on, so that, to use the slang phrase, she always got there. Yes, Queen Victoria was absolutely admirable in her conscientiousness and in her determination to do well. It angered her ever to be likened to Queen Elizabeth, who was an historical bête noire to her, yet she had something of Elizabeth’s greatness as well as more than a touch of her arrogance, added to a more intimately personal greatness of her own, that which comes from recognising the importance of little things. This did not come to its strength until after the death of Prince Albert, but it began in the days when, as a girl of eighteen, she sat surrounded by despatch-boxes while her maid was doing her hair.

THE END.

RICHARD CLAY AND SONS, LTD., BRUNSWICK ST., STAMFORD ST., S.E., AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK