"I am lodged in what is called the Devil's Tower, and have a view of the Round Tower, of which I made a sketch as soon as I was out of bed this morning."
In October the Queen and the Prince spent several days on a private visit to the Queen-dowager at her country house of Cashiobury. From Cashiobury the royal couple went on, in bad weather, to Hatfield House, which had once been a palace, but had long been the seat of the Cecils, Marquises of Salisbury. Here more than anywhere else Queen Victoria was on the track of her great predecessor, Queen Elizabeth, while the virgin queen was still the maiden princess, considerably oppressed by her stern sister Queen Mary. Queen Victoria inspected all the relics of the interesting old place, "the vineyard," the banqueting-room fallen down into a stable, and the oak still linked with the name of Queen Bess.
At Hatfield there was a laudable innovation on the usual round of festivities. From four to five hundred labourers were regaled on the lawn with a roasted ox and hogsheads of ale.
On the 1st of December, the Queen and Prince, who had been staying at Osborne, paid the Duke of Norfolk a visit at Arundel. Not only was the Duke the premier duke and Earl-Marshal of England, but he held at this time the high office in the Household of Master of the Horse. The old keep and tower at Arundel were brilliantly illuminated in honour of the Queen's presence, and bonfires lit up the surrounding country. The Duke of Wellington was here also, walking about with the Queen, while the younger men shot with Prince Albert. On the second day of her stay her Majesty received guests in the state drawing-room. The third day included the usual commemorative planting of trees in the Little Park. In the evening there was dancing, in which the Queen joined.
There were great changes, ominous of still further transitions, in the theatrical and literary world. Liston, the famous comedian who had delighted a former generation, was dead, and amateur actors, led by authors in the persons of Charles Dickens, Douglas Jerrold, &c. &c., had come to the front, and were winning much applause, as well as solid benefits for individuals and institutions connected with literature requiring public patronage. A man and a woman unlike in everything save their cordial admiration for each other, bore down all opposition in the reading world: William Makepeace Thackeray, in 1846, in spite of the discouragement of publishers, started his "Vanity Fair," and Charlotte Brontë, from the primitive seclusion of an old- fashioned Yorkshire parsonage, took England by storm with her impassioned, unconventional "Jane Eyre." The fame of these two books, while the authors were still in a great measure unknown, rang through the country.
Art in England was still following the lines laid down for the last twenty or thirty years, unless in the case of Turner, who had entered some time before on the third period of his work, the period marked by defiance and recklessness as well as by noble power.
CHAPTER VI.
INSTALLATION OF PRINCE ALBERT AS CHANCELLOR OF CAMBRIDGE.
One thousand eight hundred and forty-seven began with the climax of the terrible famine in Ireland, and the Highlands, produced by the potato disease, which, commencing in 1845, had reappeared even more disastrously in 1846. In the Queen's speech in opening Parliament, she alluded to the famine in the land with a perceptibly sad fall of her voice.
In spite of bad trade and bad times everywhere, two millions were advanced by the Government for the relief of the perishing people, fed on doles of Indian meal; yet the mortality in the suffering districts continued tremendous.