He was sent to Oxford, but strict care was taken that he should have no part in the life of the university. He might hear lectures—he might see nothing. It was as if you were to send a lad to the theatre and set him down in a stall with his back to the stage. The first time that I saw the Prince of Wales was when his father brought him to Eton as a little boy of twelve to hear the “speeches” on the Fourth of June. What a diversion for a child of his age, to listen to us sixth form boys spouting Demosthenes, Æschylus, Cicero! I can see his poor bored little face now. It was pitiful. He is accused of never having been bookish. How could he be when, like Swinburne, he was never allowed to read even Walter Scott’s novels? Swinburne, however, when he came to Eton quickly emancipated himself. The Prince of Wales never had a chance of reading as a boy, and later in life he had no more time than was needed for studying the newspapers, which he did most conscientiously. Not upon him alone was the grip of the iron hand clenched. The instructions to his Governor, to his tutors, to the gentlemen-in-waiting—authentic documents cited by Lord Esher—make one feel the choking atmosphere of boredom through which the Prince struggled into manhood. How the kindly, genial Prince, who was to develop into what Dr. Johnson called a “clubable” man, must have chafed under this prison treatment! How he must have longed for emancipation! He had a temporary foretaste of it when in 1861 he joined the Grenadier Guards[31] at the Curragh. He always looked back with pleasure upon that short soldierly experience. When we think of the very strict severity of the Prince Consort, and when we remember the great part which he played as the Queen’s confidential political adviser, notably in the Trent affair, where his wisdom helped to soften the asperities which Lord Russell had aroused in the United States, we are apt to forget how young he was when on the 14th of December, 1861, he died—barely forty-two years of age. He had not always been popular, and the world had been jealous of his interference in public affairs; but all those jealousies were soon forgotten and the Prince’s worth was realized after his death. That cruel sorrow gave the Queen an opportunity of using the Prince of Wales in his father’s place, making him her confidant and private secretary, and guiding him through the labyrinths of that constitutional lore of which she was such a mistress. Needless to say, the opportunity was not made use of. On the contrary, in spite of the advice of more than one minister—notably of Mr. Gladstone—the Queen politically held her eldest son at arm’s length.