It was not until a few years before her death that he, already a middle-aged man of fifty, was allowed access to State papers. Shut out as he was from any participation in public affairs, his great activities were turned into two channels—social and ceremonial, and most admirably he fulfilled those very wearisome duties of royalty of which he relieved the Queen, who from that time forth worked diligently, devotedly, but unseen. Indeed her life was wrecked. She had accustomed herself to lean upon her husband, who had been her lover, her guide, and her adviser for twenty-one years of a marriage which had been blessed with a happiness rarely found in a station of life where love matches are the exception. To the outside world he might seem stiff and formal. The prescriptions of a small German Court would account for that; but to her he was always gentle, kind, sympathetic. He was an exceptional man; tall and of a commanding figure, strikingly handsome, highly educated, accomplished, judicious; he lacked but one quality—that of geniality—to make him universally popular, and even that was no misfortune, for it may have saved him from stumbling into those pitfalls with which the path of men so gifted, especially when they are in a commanding station, is beset. One side of his nature was curious. He was essentially a shy man. He would enter a room to meet some visitor whom he had summoned, sidling up, as it were, along two walls of it before stepping forward to hold out his hand. That same shyness accounts for a good deal in his character; for its aloofness and, above all, for an apparent dislike, strange in so able a man, to surround himself with all that was best and most distinguished in science and art. Such men as Darwin, Huxley, Hooker, Tyndall were practically unknown to him. He preferred the second rate. So in Art, as portrait painter, he was satisfied with Landseer and Winterhalter. Landseer no doubt was an excellent delineator of dogs and deer, but it did not seem to occur to the Prince that a man might be a first-rate painter of animal life and yet fail signally with Kings and Queens. As regards Winterhalter, it is the world’s misfortune that the portraits of the principal personages who made the history of the fifties and sixties of the last century should have been practically his monopoly.