No one could be much in communication with the Queen without being struck by her power of saying concisely what she had to say in the plainest and clearest language. The swiftness of her thought was apparent in her beautiful, firm, rapid writing. Its clearness was equally shown in her happy choice of the simplest words. She had so much ground to get over daily that she had no time to waste in elaborate expression. For her the one thing important was, that no room should be left for any misapprehension of her meaning--in short, that she should make what was plain to her own mind as plain to the minds of others as it was to herself. If a simple, everyday word or phrase would serve her purpose, she preferred it to anything more ornate. In the course of editing the _Leaves from a Journal_, Mr Helps had many struggles with Her Majesty about what he thought her too homely style, which she defended, because she could not bear it to be thought that what she wrote was written "for style and effect." "It was," she wrote to me (20th October 1868), "the simplicity of the style, and the absence of all appearance of writing for effect, which had given her book such immense and undeserved success. Besides, how could Mr Helps expect pains to be taken when she wrote late at night, suffering from headache and exhaustion, and in dreadful haste, and not for publication?" This artless skill in rendering a fresh, unstudied transcript of her impressions--a power eagerly sought for, but very often unattained by men of letters--undoubtedly gave to these jottings in Her Majesty's Journal their special charm. But its value was apparent in all she wrote. The habit of getting as near in words as possible to what was in her own mind gave great vividness and graphic force upon occasion to her style, especially where matters of importance had to be dealt with. When an authoritative Life of Her Majesty is written, proofs of this will be abundant. But, to speak only of what is already before the world, what could be more happy or to the purpose than the Addresses and Messages which she issued upon occasion to her people, and which in point merely of style, apart from the governing thought and feeling, were always masterly? The same characteristic was conspicuous in her conversation. Her words were few and well chosen. You were never puzzled to know what she meant, and she expected you, in what you said, to be equally concise and clear--exact in the expression of opinion, and rigidly accurate as to fact. Her aim always was to get at the truth. Herself the most truthful of women, she resented any shortcoming in truthfulness in others. "Oh!" she once said to me, "nobody can tell of what value it is to me to hear the truth."