yet throughout the brief and perplexed span of his reign he honestly tried to accord with the whole nation as opposed to cliques and sections of it that assumed the title of “the people.” The fact was that he acceded during one of those crises when the balance of power was shifting, and, his intellect being mediocre, he became bewildered. The new, the legitimate, the organised predominance of public opinion clashed with Parliament, and was played upon by ambitious ministers. William the Fourth lived in just fear and blunt defiance of that “Venetian oligarchy” which ever since 1704 had been the recurrent ideal of the place-engrossing, great revolution families. What he apprehended was foiled, principally by the personality of Sir Robert Peel, whom he summoned to his aid. Henceforward the monarchy became, as it ought long before to have become, completely, if gradually, popularised. When monarchy is popular, the invisibility of its office ceases to be an expedient. “... I think,” said Disraeli, in a speech of 1850, “it one of the great misfortunes of our time, and one most injurious to public liberty, that the power of the Crown has diminished.” With Victoria and our present King--if we except a very transient spasm of George III., whose first essay to be a “patriot king” had been to dismiss and thwart the most popular minister that England has ever had--monarchy has for the first time during nearly two centuries proved wholly and nationally popular. Before the Stuarts, Elizabeth had ruled by the sole virtue of her popularity; she had “inflamed the national spirit,” and the checks introduced by the Revolution were only a necessity for unpopular sovereigns. The Press has now introduced a far greater check than any of these. Now that the nation is in full unison with the Crown, the King is doubly entitled to support the nation in hours of befitting emergency against the cabals or passions of a person, a clique, or a class. A modern English King is too cognisant of the popular feeling eloquent in an unbridled press ever to violate it; he could not do so with impunity. The last surrender of “independent kingship,” which Mr. Gladstone has noted, and others after him, was in 1827, when a weak sovereign renewed the “charter of administration of the day.” There is no pretext now for a King to yield or hide his just and popular privileges to serve the turn of ministers. The necessity for a “monarch of Downing Street” has disappeared. Disraeli adverted to some of these topics at Manchester in 1872, long after the events of those times had passed, but when “the banner of republicanism” was once again unfurled.