The Queen's intolerance of affectation, verbosity, or obscurity of language affected her judgment not only of men, but also of much of the contemporary literature which found favour with others. She loved and appreciated, and indeed delighted in poetry, but it must be poetry as the vehicle of genuine feeling or wholesome and instructive thought, clothed in the musical language which ingratiates it to the memory, without the inversions or obscurity of phrase or the exaggerations of metaphor or sentiment, which are so often mistaken for originality and strength. In my experience, Her Majesty was not prone to offer critical opinions upon books, but when she did so, her judgments were to the point. Thus, in speaking to me about George Eliot's _Middlemarch_, she remarked, after saying much about the subtle delineation of the various characters, "After all, fine as it is, it is a disappointing book; all the people are failures"--meaning not in the way they were drawn, but in the issues of their lives, as in truth they are. The Queen knew, I should say, quite as much of literature, music, and the arts as most of the people who think themselves entitled to speak with authority upon all these topics; but she knew the limitations of her own knowledge, and was much too sincere and too modest to affect authority to dilate upon them. This she left to those who had made them their special study, and was "Contented if she might enjoy The things which others understand," or think they understand. She had no leisure for abstruse studies. She had one great book always before her, which commanded and absorbed her supreme attention--the book of human life, of human good and ill within her kingdom, and of all that was going on in Europe and throughout her vast dominions. The study of that book left little leisure for great attainments in literature, science, or the arts. To music she had been devoted from her youth. She had grown up in the love of the chief Italian composers, ancient and modern, of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer, and Verdi in the modern school--in short, all the great masters of melody who wrote from and to the heart. It was not, then, surprising that she cared comparatively little for the writers of the latest school, Wagner, Brahms, Grieg, and others, who write much less from the heart than from the head, building up elaborately scientific tonic structures, the symmetry of which it is difficult to trace, and weaving complicated harmonies that tax and exhaust the attention, and savour more of the science than of the soul of music. However indifferent the Queen might be to productions of this class, she was keenly alive to every piece of pure melodic and harmonious inspiration.