Gallery portrait by Bothmann presented to Madame Tussaud’s by the Tsar.
Nearly forty years later, on the assassination of Nicholas’s son, Alexander—to which allusion has been made—there appeared in one of our leading English illustrated papers, which gave pages to the story of the assassination, a full double-page picture of the Imperial study at St. Petersburg, and, behold, therein stood the identical chair which we had sent to Nicholas I.
It is interesting to note that on Wednesday, the 20th of October, thirty-six years later, a number of Princesses came to the Exhibition; and among them was Princess Alix of Hesse, then a happy young girl of eight, and now mourned as the late Tsarina, who, as reported, shared with the Tsar and his family a terrible death at the hands of diabolical assassins during the recent Russian Revolution. Among the royal party which came on that day were our own Princesses Louise, Victoria, and Maud of Wales.
A great Wesleyan preacher and lecturer in his day was the Rev. Peter McKenzie, who died in November, 1895. He deserves a place in these memoirs on account of his characteristic and rather eccentric behaviour when he visited the Exhibition. In the course of his perambulation through the galleries he, like most of our patrons, found his way to the Napoleon Rooms, where Voltaire’s chair immediately arrested his attention.
Striking an indignant attitude in front of it, the Wesleyan preacher exclaimed, “And this belonged to the man that was going to pull down the edifice of Christianity and sweep the religion of Jesus Christ from the earth!” So saying, he planted himself in the chair and, with a triumphant wave of his hand, declaimed to the wondering visitors gathered round the following verse of a well-known hymn:
Jesus shall reign where’er the sun
Doth his successive journeys run;
His kingdom stretch from shore to shore,
Till moons shall wax and wane no more.