The procession of the Knights of the Garter ought to have been an imposing spectacle, but the good Knights, arrayed in their blue velvet robes, resplendent with their golden collars and stars, instead of marching decorously two and two with a suitably solemn space between the pairs, had contrived to club themselves into a clumsy knot made up of figures of various sizes and shapes in which they looked anything but dignified, the tall and stately Lord Shaftesbury towering over the puny form of Lord Russell. They badly needed a stage-manager. The trumpets bray out triumphantly announcing the procession of the Bridegroom, stately, solemn, full of dignity. Once more the trumpets. Amidst all the glory of that wonderful day nothing could equal the procession of the Bride. The touching tenderness of her girlish, rosebud beauty and graceful figure, as she passed up the nave, her eyes shyly downcast, looked like the vision of the Princess of a Fairy Tale. Her entry into London had been the triumph of a conqueress—her entry into St. George’s Chapel was the assumption of a Queendom over the hearts of England from which nothing can ever dethrone her. It was a sad sight to see the great Queen, then only entering into middle age, looking down from her gallery to bless her son’s happiness! When the trumpets heralded the Wedding March amid the clatter of arms of the saluting Guards, the pealing of the organ, the roll of the kettledrums, and the roaring salvoes of artillery, it was impossible not to feel that her thoughts must be travelling back to the death-chamber hard by, where, some fifteen months earlier, she entered upon the long, lonely years of her widowhood. Half hidden, her pathetic figure struck the one sad note, the _memento mori_, in all that frenzy of rejoicing, all that radiance of pomp and splendour, the celebration of a nation’s sympathy with a well-beloved Prince. Perhaps I ought rather to say a Prince whom the people were ready to take to their hearts; for he was still a lad, and had not yet had the chance of showing what he really was worth. At the risk of forestalling such story as I have to tell I would fain insert here a slight attempt at an appreciation of that young bridegroom as he appeared in later life and during his too short reign as King. A comparison of the power exercised by him and that of the great Mother whom he succeeded almost inevitably comes within the scope of such an endeavour. It is one of the penalties of a high position that whereas the failings of those who occupy it are apt to be viewed through a magnifying glass, their good qualities are too often examined through the wrong end of a telescope. Even those whose nature and knowledge would prompt them to deal out praise in full measure, speak under the restraint of a reticence the motives of which are not difficult to understand; and the more exalted the subject of this post-mortem examination of character, the more severe is that restraint almost bound to be.