In this mere sketch of the great life of the Queen of England, I can give little space to the political questions and events of her reign, important and momentous as some of them were, even for other lands and other people than the English. For a clear and concise account of those questions and events, I refer my readers to "A History of Our Own Times," by Justin McCarthy, M.P. I know nothing so admirable of its kind. But mine must be something less ambitious--a personal and domestic history-- light, gossipy, superficial, as regards the profound mysteries of politics; in short, "pure womanly." I shall not even treat of the great wars which stormed over the Continent, and upset and set up thrones, except as they affected the life of my illustrious subject. At first they seemed to form a lurid background to the bright pictures of peace and love presented by her happy marriage and maternity, and afterwards in the desolation and mourning they brought, seemed in keeping with the sorrow of her widowhood. Happily all was quiet and peace in the United Kingdom, and in the world at large, when the honeymoon began for that august but simple-hearted pair of lovers, Victoria and Albert; or, as she would have preferred to write it, Albert and Victoria. The fiery little spurt of revolt in Canada, called rather ambitiously, "The Canadian Rebellion," had ended in smoke, and the outburst of Chartism, from the spontaneous combustion of sullen and long-smothered discontent among the working classes, had been extinguished, partly by a fog of misapprehension and misdirection, partly by a process of energetic stamping out. The shameful Chinese opium war, the Cabul disasters, and the fearful Sepoy rebellion were, as yet, only slow, simmering horrors in the black caldron of the Fates. Irish starvation had not set in, in its acute form, and Irish sedition was, as yet, taking only the form of words--the bold, eloquent, magnificent, but not malignant and scarcely menacing words of Daniel O'Connell In the Infernal Council Chamber below, the clock whose hours are epochs of crime, had not yet struck for the era of political assassination. France was resting and cooling from the throes and fires of revolution, and growing the vine over its old lava courses. The citizen-King and his family were setting an example of domestic affection and union, of morality, thrift, and forehandedness--diligently making hay while the fickle sun of French loyalty was shining. Italy was lying deathly quiet under the mailed foot of Austria, and under the paternal foot of the old Pope, shod with a velvet slipper, cross-embroidered, but leaden-soled; Garibaldi was fighting for liberty in "the golden South Americas"; Mazzini was yet dreaming of liberty--so was Kossuth. Russia was quietly gathering herself up for new leaps of conquest tinder her most imperial, inflexible autocrat--the inscrutable, unsmiling Nicholas.