With music, especially sacred music and the Opera, there was great sympathy at Court. The Prince was an accomplished and scientific musician and the Queen had a lovely voice which was well-trained by that wonderful old singer Lablache. But for Literature there appeared to be no place. I have a sort of recollection that Dickens was once sent for to Buckingham Palace, but that was not until 1870, the year of his death. The Prince was greatly pleased with Thackeray’s “May-day Ode” on the opening of the Exhibition of 1851, and he loved Tennyson’s “Idylls of the King,”—they aroused in him the ideal of the chivalry which he worshipped. But there the matter ended, there was no literary society, no love of books. The Prince and the Queen were absorbed in politics, and their relaxation was taken in other directions, such as the theatre and the Opera. I dwell upon all this because I am anxious to show how King Edward’s up-bringing accounted for that indifference to books with which his biographers have taxed him. It is the fashion to talk with contempt of what is called the Early Victorian Era. In Letters, at any rate, the reproach is undeserved. There was no lack of considerable men. Putting on one side the three great names that I have already cited, we had Carlyle, Browning, Froude, George Eliot, the Brontës, Ruskin and others. In the memorandum for the guidance of the gentlemen appointed to attend on the Prince of Wales they are told to encourage the Prince “to devote some of his leisure time to music, to the fine arts, either drawing or looking over drawings, engravings, etc., to hearing poetry, amusing books or good books read aloud!” But of that delightful solitary communing with books which are the living souls of great men—such books as those written by the contemporaries of whom I have spoken, there is not a word. Fancy an ardent boy of seventeen spending his leisure time in turning over books of drawings and prints! Would it not be mental starvation? How much more human would it be for a boy to read “Pickwick,” “Martin Chuzzlewit,” “Vanity Fair,” “Scenes from Clerical Life,” “The Princess,” “Jane Eyre”! For my part I would far rather see a son of mine frown over the savagery of Mr. Rochester, or laugh at Mrs. Gamp and Mr. Pecksniff, than waste smiles of young-lady-like admiration upon Retsch’s outlines or the “Keepsake.” But the whole memorandum is one of the strangest of documents, reading as if it had been composed for the use and guidance of a seminary for young ladies.