Indeed, it was under Melbourne’s encouragements, and his stimulative commendation (if stimulus were needed), that the young princess formed shortly after that marriage relation which proved altogether a happy one--giving to England and to the world shining proof that righteous domesticities were not altogether clean gone from royal houses. And if the good motherly rulings have not had their best issues with some of the male members of the family, can we not match these wry tendencies with those fastening upon the boys of well-ordered households all around us? It is not in royal circles only that his satanic majesty makes friends of nice boys, when the girls escape him--or seem to! Well, I have gone back to that old palace of Kensington, which still, with its mossy brick walls, in the west of London, baffles the years, and the fogs--the same palace where we went to find William III. dying, and the gracious Queen Anne too; and where now the Marquis of Lorne and the Princess Louise have their home. I have taken you again there to see how the young Victoria bore herself at the news of her accession--with the great councillors of the kingdom about her--not alone because those whom we shall bring to the front, in this closing chapter, have wrought during her reign; but because, furthermore, she with her household have been encouragers and patrons of both letters and of art in many most helpful ways; and yet, again, because this queen, who has within this twelve-month (1897) made her new speech to Parliament--sixty years after that first little speech at Kensington--is herself, in virtue of certain modest book-making, to be enrolled with all courtesy in the Guild of Letters. And though the high-stepping critics may be inclined to question the literary judgment or the scrupulous finish of her book-work, we cannot, I think, deny to it a thoroughly humane tone, and a tender realism. We greet her not only by reason of her queenship proper, but for that larger sovereignty of womanhood and of motherhood which she has always dignified and adorned. I once caught such glimpse of her--as strangers may--in the flush of her early wedded life; not beautiful surely, but comely, kindly, and radiant, in the enjoyment of--what is so rare with sovereigns--a happy home-life; and again I came upon other sight of her eight years later, when the prince was a rollicking boy, and the princess a blooming maiden; these and lesser rosy-cheeked ones were taking the air on the terrace at Windsor, almost in the shadow of the great keep, which has frowned there since the days of Edward III. _Macaulay._