Of Her Majesty's executive power as an artist I cannot speak, as what I know of her work is confined to a few slight sketches, and the etchings which she made, when Prince Albert and herself were for a time fascinated by that attractive but difficult process. Of these I owe to the Queen's kindness a complete series.[6] Of them it is enough to say that the drawing is not remarkable, and that, as etchings, the difficulties of the art have not been overcome. But I had frequent occasion to observe that Her Majesty's studies had resulted in a power of judging good artistic work beyond that of even the tolerably accomplished amateur. She was in the constant habit of having engravings made of the portraits of her family and friends, for private circulation, and for several years I acted, by her desire, as the medium of communication between her and the brothers Francis and William Holl, the eminent engravers, by whom the work was done. The engravers' proofs of these, always carefully scrutinised by the Queen, were never returned to me without some pertinent comment, sometimes illustrated by a drawing by the Queen upon the margin. "None but an artist could have made that suggestion" was a not uncommon remark of the engraver. It showed him how to correct something which he himself had not seen the way to amend. With so much to do and think of, Her Majesty was entitled to expect from her Ministers that all important matters submitted for her consideration should be explained in language at once lucid and concise. This, no doubt, was generally done. But a very remarkable instance to the contrary came under my notice while I was lying ill at Osborne. The Irish Church Disestablishment question, which in 1867 had been much agitated, took the shape, in January 1868, of a bill, the printed draft of which, together with a letter explanatory of the measure, was sent by Mr Gladstone to the Queen. Her Private Secretary, General Grey, must have been absent from Osborne at the time, otherwise the Queen would have turned to him for aid in clearing up any difficulty she found in mastering these documents. I was therefore surprised to receive a note from Her Majesty, sending them to me, requesting me to read and return them with a _precis_ of their contents, as she had read and re-read Mr Gladstone's very long letter, and found herself more and more lost in the clouds of his explanations the more she toiled through them. My opinion of the measure, of course, was not asked for--it never was upon any subject where her Ministers were properly her advisers--and Her Majesty knew she could rely on my secrecy in regard to its terms as implicitly as if I had been sworn of her Privy Council. My task was simply to analyse and state as clearly as I could the scope of the measure as I might gather it from the documents sent. That the Queen should have been lost in the fog of the long and far from lucid sentences of her Minister, running, as they did, through upwards of a