gossips, on both sides, jumped to conclusions which had questionable affinity with the premises. While the Queen was thus treated with a certain degree of moderation by the press, she is said to have been seriously coerced by the liberal ministry of the day. The charge was distinctly made, after the Queen’s death, in a funeral sermon, preached by the Rev. Mr. Browne, Vicar of Atwick. The occasion was so solemn that an honest man was not likely to be led even into exaggeration, much less into deliberate misrepresentation. These are the preacher’s own words:-- ‘The Queen-consort had witnessed in her father-land some of the dreadful effects of the French revolutionary movements; and she was known to disapprove, out of womanly feeling and fear for her husband’s safety, of popular tumults and agitations. With the narrow-minded and impure suspicion is proof, and is followed by resentment. This pure being was a sufferer by the machinations and exactions of the ephemeral favourites of the misguided populace. Her influence over her royal husband was too great to be trusted, and she was forbidden--I speak advisedly, and mean nothing less than “forbidden”--to have a kindred spirit near her during the agitation and intimidation by which the measure called the Reform Bill was supported and carried.’ It was when that bill was in jeopardy, when the King--who had made so many knights that the very pages called them the ‘Arabians,’ the ‘Thousand and One’--hesitated to create a sufficient number of new lords to secure the passing of the bill in the Upper House; it was then that the press began to admonish the King and to menace the Queen. On one occasion, when they attended at the opening of the new Staines Bridge, where, by the way, they were so closely pressed upon by the mob that maids of honour and gentlemen-in-waiting had their pockets picked, the Conservative wits remarked that the King might make new bridges, but that he must leave the _peers_ alone. The Whig party at once assumed that Queen Adelaide was at the head of a faction whose object was to give reality to such jokes, and thenceforward the Queen was little spared. The ‘Times’ asserted that it was by ‘domestic importunity’ alone that the free action of the King’s mind was impeded. The Queen was compared to Queen Amata, in the ‘Æneid,’ cajoling or raging at her older consort, Latinus, because the latter preferred Æneas to Turnus as a husband for their daughter Lavinia. There was not much alike in the two cases, for Amata was a staunch Conservative, who detested the idea of a foreign prince obtaining the hand of her daughter, and exercising influence within the limits of Latium. But there were strong terms in the original which suited the purpose of the hour, and the Queen was pelted with them most unmercifully.