That beneficent intelligence is in human shape no longer with us. Never was there man whose works and projects have lived after him more vigorously and usefully than the Prince Consort. To the generation that has grown up since his death, the notions which he was the first to apply to the Court usages of England, the ends to which, before him, no member of the reigning family had employed the opportunities of the Crown are so familiar; they seem so essential a part of the Kingly office; a Sovereign or a Prince not discharging such duties is so inconceivable by nineteenth century Britons, as to make many persons forget the existence of a time when this portion of the Royal duties was disliked as a novelty, or resented as an impertinence. It is not too much to say that the Victorian England of these later years is that which, more than any other uncrowned individual, the Prince Consort was the instrument of making it. He it was who set the example of that many-sided, almost ubiquitous, assistance in the extra-political occasions of English life which to-day are more conspicuously associated with the representatives of the kingly principle in England than the attendance at levees, or the opening of drawing rooms. Nor must it ever be forgotten that the future husband of the Queen from earliest youth, not less than her future Majesty herself, was trained with an eye to the possibilities of the alliance and the duties that the accident of birth might have in store. Writing in July 1821 to the Duchess of Kent, the Dowager Duchess of Coburg says of the young Prince Albert: 'The little fellow is the pendant to the pretty cousin' (the Princess Victoria).[60] Prince Leopold, who married the Princess Charlotte naturally supplied the first link of cousinly association between his nephew and niece. Other and more highly placed suitors were not of course wanting. But it needed no great experience in the tactics of matrimonial diplomacy accurately to conjecture the relations tolerably certain to be developed between the second son of Duke Ernest of Saxe-Coburg-Saafeld and the niece of William IV., heiress to the English Crown. It is well that the august contingencies of the future should sometimes have been forecast by those around the young Prince. Otherwise it might have proved more difficult than subsequently it did prove, or perhaps have been found impracticable to rear on the foundations of boyish education the fabric of a genuine knowledge of English character, of English life and institutions. Hence it was that the disappointment of Lord Melbourne's over sanguine anticipations of the reception of the Prince by his adopted countrymen was borne with the equanimity which he showed on hearing that the proposed allowance of £50,000 a year, though not, as Colonel Sibthorp suggested, reduced to £21,000, was to be fixed at £30,000. All he regretted was that his ability to help artists, men of learning and of