The property bequeathed to her amounted to upward of L500,000; so that, supposing Her Majesty to have spent every penny of her public and duchy of Lancaster incomes, and to have only laid by this legacy and the interest on it, she would from this source alone now be worth at least L1,000,000. Be this as it may, even that portion of the public which survives her will probably never know the amount of her wealth, for the wills of kings and queens are not proved; so that there will be no enlightenment on this head in the pages of the _Illustrated London News_. Both Osborne House in the Isle of Wight, and Balmoral, were bought prior to Mr. Neild's bequest. These palaces are the personal property of Her Majesty, and very valuable: probably the two may, with their contents, be valued at L500,000 at the lowest. The building and repairs at these palaces are paid for by the queen herself, but those of all the palaces of the Crown are at the expense of the country, and about a million has been expended on Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle during the present reign. The claims made on the queen for charity are exceedingly numerous. They are all most carefully examined by the keeper of her privy purse, and help is invariably extended to proper objects. But whilst duly recognizing such calls upon her, the queen has never been regarded as open-handed. Her munificence, for example, has not been on the scale of that of the late queen Adelaide, the widow of William IV. It is to be remembered that her father suffered all his life from straitened circumstances, and indeed it was by means of money supplied by friends that the duchess of Kent was enabled to reach England and give birth to its future sovereign on British soil. Although the duke died when his daughter was too young to have heard from him of these pecuniary troubles, she was no doubt cautioned by her mother to avoid all chance of incurring them; and a circumstance in itself likely to impress their inconvenience on her memory was that one of the first acts of her reign was to pay off, principal and interest, the whole of her father's remaining liabilities.