Almost daily during the three following weeks we had the honour of lengthened visits in our rooms from Her Majesty, in which there was a frank interchange of views, not only in regard to the subject on which I was specially engaged, but also upon the events of the day and other topics of general interest. It so happened that just at this time the _Leaves from a Journal_ were published. Her Majesty's estimate of that little volume was most humble; and as, possibly from a feeling of shyness, she shrank from writing with this first literary effort to the Poet Laureate, she honoured me by requesting me to do so on her behalf. The Queen reverenced genius; greatness in birth and station she regarded as but an accident. To the genius which makes its own position by commanding the love and admiration of the world she bowed with genuine humility. How well this was shown in her visit to Abbotsford! "In the study," she writes, "we saw Sir Walter's Journal, in which Mr Hope Scott asked me to write my name, _which I felt it would be presumption to do_." Surely a beautiful appreciation of genius, as distinguished from the accident of position. The _Leaves_ book was inscribed by the Queen's own hand, and this was the acknowledgment which reached me from Mr Tennyson:-- "FARRINGFORD, FRESHWATER, _21st January 1868_. "DEAR MR MARTIN,--We are very sorry to hear of your accident, and fear, from what you say, that it may have caused you much pain. We are sure that with the Queen, if anywhere, you will have been made to forget it. "I need not say that I am very much honoured by Her Majesty's gift--you know that; and I know that I may trust to you to make my thanks acceptable for a book not only of so much interest in its own day, but trebly valuable to the historian of that future when we shall all of us have gone to join Tullus and Ancus. "Will you remember us most kindly to Mrs Martin? and with a hope that you will soon be well, I am, yours very sincerely, "A. TENNYSON." I must have written to the Queen in warm terms of satisfaction at the burst of enthusiastic and affectionate loyalty with which her little volume was hailed, knowing, as I did, how this feeling contrasted with much of a very different tenor to which Her Majesty's close retirement after the Prince's death had given rise, and which had caused her extreme pain, for on the 16th of January the following note was sent to my room:--