Leslie, whose picture of the Coronation was painted at Windsor, gave a pleasant account of the Queen's kindly and easy ways. "She is now," he says, "so far satisfied with the likeness that she does not wish me to touch it again. She sat five times--not only for the face, but for as much as is seen of the figure, and for the hands, with the coronation- ring on the finger. Her hands, by the by, are very pretty--the backs dimpled and the fingers delicately shaped. She was particular to have her hair dressed exactly as she wore it at the ceremony every time she sat." The Queen in her writings says very little of this portion of her "strange, eventful history,"--a time so filled with incident, so gilded with romance, so bathed in poetry, so altogether splendid in the eyes of all the world; for to her, life--or all which was most "happy and glorious" in life--began and ended with Prince Albert. She even speaks with regret of that period of single queenliness, and says: "A worse school for a young girl--one more detrimental to all natural feelings and affections--cannot well be imagined than the position of a Queen at eighteen without experience and without a husband to guide and support her. This the Queen can state from painful experience, and she thanks God that none of her own dear daughters are exposed to such danger." Human nature is rash and young-woman-nature ambitious and ill-disposed to profit by the costly experience of eld, and I doubt not the clever Princess Royal or the proud and fair Princess Louise would have mounted any throne in Christendom "without alarm." Most of Her Majesty's loyal subjects deny that any harm came to her from her unsupported position as Queen Regnant, or that she was capable of being thus harmed--but the Queen knows best.