As time passed, Elizabeth had other reminders that she was growing old.
“I blush to think how often I am late of a morning, which is not like me, but my poor legs require time,” she writes in November, 1833. “First I read my serious readings, then write, and do what business I must do, and of late I have had a good deal of what I call parish business, settling work for the poor and trying to content them if possible.” She seems to have cultivated her mind in a wholesome way without harbouring any foolish ambitions. “I have taught myself to see everything with pleasure and without envy,” she remarks, and added later, “Without religion there can be no peace, no order, no blessing.”
The Princess was struck with the excess of luxury in England in 1836. “More jewels and more extravagance than ever.”
It was then that she saw the last of her brother William IV., whose death in the following year she sincerely deplored. Elizabeth thus survived to see the opening of the present reign; but she belonged too much to a former age and to a different order of things to have much sympathy with the new and more promising outlook of the Victorian era.
The memorial volume which Mr. Yorke has so well edited is of considerable interest and of permanent value.
G. H. P.
[VARIETIES.]
He Threw Away the Stone.
The haughty favourite of an oriental monarch once in the public street threw a stone at a poor dervish or priest.