No breath of scandal ever dimmed the mirror of the Empress’s fair fame. Queen Victoria herself was not more stern in the repression of anything approaching loose or unseemly talk. She considered it to be the duty of persons in high places to repress any lack of decorum, and their privilege to set an example to be followed by others. To her daughter, the Queen of Naples, she wrote: “It is our duty to remember that a word in season or a grave look will silence those who indulge in unlicensed speech, and have an excellent general effect.” Nothing better nails to the counter the lies of Frederic the Great, so characteristically Prussian, than the fact that the capital, which up to her time had been notorious for the laxity of its morals, was described by Sir John Moore towards the end of her reign in very laudatory language. “I can imagine,” he says, “no city in Europe where a young gentleman would see fewer examples, or have fewer opportunities of deep gaming, open profligacy, or gross debauchery than in Vienna.” This, as her biographer, Mary Maxwell Moffat, says, is a great testimony to the uplifting influence of the Empress-Queen. That the influence was personal is proved by the relapse of Vienna during the nineteenth century. By precept and example, she cast out the swine, but when she was gone they came back again. It was the irony of fate that neither the Empress’s virtues, her great beauty, her sweet disposition, nor the prestige of her glorious position were able to clip the wings of her flighty and too attractive husband. That she had some inkling of her failure is clear from the advice that she once gave to her favourite maiden Charlotte: “Be warned and do not marry a man who has nothing to do.” Queen Victoria was more fortunate. Her marriage remained a union of hearts, of which time itself had no power to relax the bonds. In all that concerns art Queen Victoria was essentially a woman of her own time, and it is in no sense derogatory to her to say that it was certainly not a happy time. In the plastic arts she had not the talent of her two brilliant daughters, the Empress Frederic and Princess Louise. It is true that her sketch-book was the constant companion of her holidays, and illustrated the diary of her travels; but her execution did not go much beyond the boundaries of the school-girl’s album. The painters whom she chose to employ as portraitists—Winterhalter, Landseer, Von Angeli—were unluckily chosen. She admired and patronized Leighton, but she would not hear of being painted by Millais or Watts. Music was her delight, and so it was with Marie Theresia; both ladies loved the Italian school, both were themselves gifted with lovely voices and had been well trained. Indeed, in the Hapsburg family the talent was hereditary; all the older members of it were capable musicians, and Charles the Sixth would himself accompany their chamber music on the harpsichord.