The year following the visit to Ireland the Queen's seventh child was born, a boy.
"Now we are just as many as the days of the week," cried the brothers and sisters joyfully.
"But which of us shall be Sunday?" asked one.
"The new baby," answered Princess "Vicky" decidedly, "because he's just come, and we must be polite to him and give him the best."
The little boy was named Patrick, as the old woman in Ireland had suggested, but his first name was Arthur, for the Duke of Wellington, on whose eighty-first birthday he was born.
The days of the Queen were full of joys and sorrows that came almost hand in hand. Her home life was perfectly happy, but her duties as a sovereign took much time that she would have gladly given to her family. "It is hard," she said, "that I cannot always hear my children say their prayers." She had the warmest, most devoted friends, but in the six years preceding 1850, she had lost several who could never be replaced. Sir Robert Peel and Lord Melbourne had died, the opposing Ministers who had both won her confidence and gratitude; and the "good Queen Adelaide," who had loved the little Princess Victoria as if she had been her own child, was also gone. The sorrow which Prince Albert felt at the loss of his father had been to his wife a grief almost as deep; and both she and the Prince were saddened by the loss of the Coburg grandmother, who loved him so that she was almost heartbroken on his leaving her to make his home in England, and called piteously after his carriage, "Oh, Albert, Albert!" The three who had been nearest to the Queen in her childhood were living, her mother, Dr. Davys, and Baroness Lehzen. The kind, scholarly clergyman she had made Bishop of Peterborough, and she saw him from time to time. After the marriage of the Queen the Baroness Lehzen returned to her friends in Germany, but the busy sovereign found time to send her long and frequent letters.
The losses of the Queen were many, but with Prince Albert by her side, she felt that she could bear whatever came; and it was a great happiness to her that the better he was known in the country, the more highly the nation thought of him. They could hardly help esteeming him, for he seemed never to have a thought of himself; all was for the Queen and for her people. For several years he had had a plan in his mind for a great industrial exhibition. When he first laid the scheme before the public, the people were wildly enthusiastic. Then, as the difficulties arose, there was much criticism. The building would cost $1,000,000, and subscriptions were slow. Punch brought out a cartoon inscribed, "Please to remember the Exposition." It represented a boy holding out his cap for pennies Under the picture was written:
"Pity the sorrows of a poor young Prince ——
Whose costly scheme has borne him to your door;
Who's in a fix—the matter not to mince—