Long before the press had commenced directing an undesired notice upon the Queen private circles were canvassing her conduct with regard, especially, to this matter of reform. ‘By-the-bye,’ says Moore in his diary, ‘the Queen being, as is well known, adverse to the measure which is giving such popularity to her royal husband, reminds me a little of the story of the King of Sparta, who first gave his assent to the establishment of the Ephori. His wife, it is said, reproached him with this step, and told him that he was delivering down the royal power to his children _less_ than he had received it. “Greater,” he answered, “because more durable.” This is just such an answer as William IV. would be likely to give to _his_ wife. But the event proved the Spartan Queen to have been right, for the Ephori extinguished the royal power; and if Queen Adelaide’s bodings are of the same description, they are but too likely to be _in the same manner realized_’--a curious avowal from Lord Lansdowne’s Whig friend. There are few things which more forcibly strike a student of the political literature of this period than its wide difference from that which now generally prevails. It seemed, in those days, as if no public writer could command or control his temper. The worst things were expressed in the worst forms, and writers had not reached, or did not care to practise, the better style by which a man may censure sharply without doing undue wrong to the object of his censure, without losing his own self-respect or forfeiting that of his readers. Taken altogether, the year 1832 may be said to have been the most eventful and the least felicitous in the life of Queen Adelaide. It was a year which opened gloomily for the court, both politically and personally. At one of the small festivities held at the Pavilion, the King’s old friend, Mr. Greenwood, of the firm of Cox and Greenwood, Army Agents, was playing whist, after dinner, with the Queen for a partner, and the King and Sir Herbert Taylor for adversaries. During the progress of the game he was taken ill, became insensible, and, on being removed from the room by Sir Herbert and Lord Erroll, died in an adjoining apartment, within a quarter of an hour. The Queen was very much shocked at this incident, and the elder ladies about court, who thought it ominous of a fatal year--for already were movements hostile to monarchy becoming active--considered the next month’s omen of unpleasant significance too, when the fog in London, on the night of the anniversary of the Queen’s birthday, was so dense that not a lamp of illuminations was visible through the mist. Then ensued, in the subsequent spring, the unpleasant feud with the Sefton family, in which Queen Adelaide’s name was so prominent.