So much has lately been written about the supreme happiness of the Queen’s married life, and so much has been revealed of her inner family circle, that no more is needed to make every woman realise the anguish of the great bereavement of her life. In earlier and happier years she wrote to her uncle Leopold on the occasion of one of the Prince Consort’s short absences from her: “You cannot think how much this costs me, nor how completely forlorn I am and feel when he is away, or how I count the hours till he returns. All the numerous children are as nothing to me when he is away. It seems as if the whole life of the house and home were gone.” Poor Queen, poor woman! Surely it is ungenerous, while she so strenuously goes on working at the duties of her position, to blame her because she cannot again join in what are supposed to be its pleasures.

One of the princesses lately spoke of the loneliness of the Queen. “You can have no idea,” she is reported to have said, “how lonely mamma is.” All who were her elders, and in a sense her guardians and protectors in the earlier part of her reign, have been removed by death. Her strongest affections are in the past, and with the dead. She is reported to have said on the death of one of those nearest to her: “There is no one left to call me Victoria now!” The etiquette which, in public at any rate, rules the behaviour of her children and grandchildren to the Queen, seems to render her isolation more painful than it would otherwise be. Lady Lyttelton, who was governess to the royal children, is stated in the Greville Memoirs to have said that “the Queen was very fond of them, but severe in her manner, and a strict disciplinarian.” This may have perhaps increased her present loneliness, if it created a sense of reserve and formality between her children and herself.

The Queen has always shown a truly royal appreciation of those who were great in art, science, or literature. It is well known that she sent her book, Leaves from our Journal in the Highlands, to Charles Dickens, with the inscription, “From one of the humblest of writers to one of the greatest.” Mrs. Somerville, in her Reminiscences, speaks of the gracious reception given to herself by the Queen while she was still Princess Victoria, when the authoress presented a copy of her Mechanism of the Heavens to the Duchess of Kent and her daughter. More than twenty years later Mrs. Somerville wrote, “I am glad to hear that the Queen has been so kind to my friend Faraday. It seems she has given him an apartment at Hampton Court, nicely fitted up. She went to see it herself, and having consulted scientific men as to the instruments necessary for his pursuits, she had a laboratory fitted up with them, and made him a present of the whole. That is doing things handsomely, and no one since Newton has deserved so much.” The Queen was also very ready to show her warm appreciation of Carlyle and other eminent writers. In an interview with Carlyle, at the Deanery, Westminster, she quite charmed the rugged old philosopher by her kind and gracious manner. Many years ago, when the fame of Jenny Lind was at its height, she was invited to sing in private before the Queen at Buckingham Palace. Owing to some contemptible spite or jealousy, her accompanist did not play what was set down in the music, and this of course had a very discomposing effect upon the singer. The Queen’s quick ear immediately detected what was going on, and at the conclusion of the song, when another was about to be commenced, she stepped up to the piano and said, “I will accompany Miss Lind.”

The Queen’s strong personal interest in all that concerns the welfare of her kingdom is well known. She became almost ill with anxiety about the sufferings of our troops in the Crimea, and she wrote frequently to Lord Raglan on the subject. Before the end of the siege of Sebastopol, Lord Cardigan returned from the Crimea on a short visit to England, and came to see the Queen at Windsor. One of the royal children said to him, “You must hurry back to Sebastopol and take it, else it will kill mamma!” In the summer of 1886, during the anxious political crisis of that time, a gentleman, who had just seen the Queen, was asked how she looked. “Ten years younger than she did a fortnight ago,” was the reply. The severity of the crisis was for the time averted, and the relief of mind it brought to the Queen could be plainly read in the change in her aspect.

A wise and good clergyman, who was also a witty and powerful writer, the Rev. Sydney Smith, preached a sermon in St. Paul’s Cathedral on the Queen’s accession, in which he gave utterance to the hope that she would promote the spread of national education, and would “worship God by loving peace.” “The young Queen,” he said, “at that period of life which is commonly given up to frivolous amusement, sees at once the great principles by which she should be guided, and steps at once into the great duties of her station.” He then spoke again of peace and of education as the two objects towards which a patriot Queen ought most earnestly to strive, and concluded: “And then this youthful monarch, profoundly but wisely religious, disdaining hypocrisy, and far above the childish follies of false piety, casts herself upon God, and seeks from the Gospel of His blessed Son a path for her steps and a comfort for her soul. Here is a picture which warms every English heart and could bring all this congregation upon their bended knees before Almighty God to pray it may be realised. What limits to the glory and happiness of our native land, if the Creator should in His mercy have placed in the heart of this Royal Woman the rudiments of wisdom and mercy; and if giving them time to expand, and to bless our children’s children with her goodness, He should grant to her a long sojourning on earth, and leave her to reign over us till she is well stricken in years! What glory! what happiness! what joy! what bounty of God!”

The preacher’s anticipations of a long reign have been fulfilled, and the bright hopes of that seedtime of promise and resolution can now be compared with the harvest of achievement and fulfilment. There is always a great gap between such anticipations and the accomplished fact; but it will be well for us all, high or low, if we are able, when we stand near the end of life and review the past, to feel that we have been equally steadfast to the high resolves of our youth, as the Queen has been to the words, “I will be good,” which she uttered sixty years ago.

[1]. Written for the Jubilee, June 1887.

VII
HARRIET MARTINEAU

Harriet Martineau is one of the most distinguished literary women this century has produced. She is among the few women who have succeeded in the craft of journalism, and one of the still smaller number who succeeded for a time in moulding and shaping the current politics of her day. There are many things in her career which make it a particularly instructive one. Her vivid remembrance of her own childhood gave her a very strong sympathy with the feelings and sufferings of children; all mothers, especially the mothers of uncommonly intellectual children, ought to read, in the early part of Harriet Martineau’s autobiography, her record of her own childhood, and its peculiar sufferings.

The Martineaus were descended from a French Huguenot surgeon, who left his native country in 1688, after the revocation of the edict of Nantes. He settled at Norwich, and became the progenitor of a long line of distinguished surgeons in that city. Harriet’s father was a manufacturer; she was born on the 12th June 1802, the sixth of eight children. There is nothing in the outward circumstances of her youth to distinguish it from that of the substantial but simple comfort of any middle class family of that period, save that her education was above the average. The independence of judgment in religious matters that had made their ancestor a Huguenot, made the latter Martineaus Unitarians; and it was to this fact that the excellence of the education of the family was in part due. For the Rev. Isaac Perry, the head of a large and flourishing boys’ school in Norwich, became converted to the principles of Unitarianism, with the consequence of losing nearly all his pupils. The Unitarian community felt it their duty to rally round him, and support him to the utmost of their power. Hence those who, like the Martineaus, had children to educate sent them, girls as well as boys, to him. Harriet therefore had the inestimable advantage of beginning her career with a mind well equipped with stores of knowledge that were at that time usually considered quite outside the range of what was necessary for a woman.