most part he acts as a family man; his purely official acts are few.
Things that in a republic are entirely personal, as marriages, births,
christenings, deaths, and burials, whether of high or low, in a monarchy
are, if they affect royalty, of public and national concern, and it
would not be easy to show how one royal act differed from another in
greater or less publicity.
If you were of a very bold conjecture, or of a willingness to generalize
from wholly insufficient grounds, and take the chances of hitting or
missing, you might affirm a domestic simplicity of feeling in some
phases of functions exalted far beyond the range of republican
experiences or means of comparison. In the polite intelligence which we
sometimes have cabled to our press at home, by more than usually ardent
enterprise, one may have read that the king held a levee at St. James's;
and one conceived of it as something dramatic, something historic,
something, on the grand scale, civic. But if one happened to be walking
in Pall Mall on the morning of that levee, one saw merely a sort of
irregular coming and going in almost every kind of vehicle, or, as
regarded the spiritual and temporal armies, sometimes on foot. A thin
fringe of rather incurious but not unfriendly bystanders lined
the curbstone, and looked at the people arriving in the carriages,
victorias, hansoms, and four-wheelers; behind the bystanders loitered
dignitaries of the church; and military and naval officers made their
way through the fringe and crossed the street among the wheels and
horses. No one concerned seemed to feel anything odd in the effect,
though to the unwonted American the sight of a dignitary in full
canonicals or regimentals going to a royal levee in a cab or on foot is
not a vision which realizes the ideal inspired by romance. At one moment
a middle-aged lady in the line of vehicles put her person well out of
the window of her four-wheeler, and craned her head up to instruct her
driver in something. She may not have been going to the levee, but one
felt that if she had been she would still have done what it abashed the
alien to see.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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