I did not take the Prince Consort’s book away with me to the Continent. Whatever else it might be, it was certainly not holiday reading, and it would have needed a portmanteau to itself. But the reverberation of the extraordinary and almost unequalled “boom” which the book made reached me in the recesses of Switzerland. I came on _The Times_ of three days before in my hotel, and it had three columns and a half on Mr Thompson Clinton’s work. The weekly _Budget_ which my sister sent to me at Andermatt contained, besides a long review, a portrait of the Prince Consort (he must have sat to them on purpose) and a biographical sketch of him, quite accurate as to the remarkably few incidents which his previous life contained. It was this sketch which first caused me to begin to realise what was happening. For the sketch, after a series of eulogies (which to my prepossessed mind seemed absurdly extravagant) on the Prince Consort, reached its conclusion with the following remark:--“Mr Thompson Clinton’s wife is also a writer, and is known in the literary world as the author of more than one clever and amusing novel.” I laid down the _Budget_ with a vague feeling that a revolution had occurred. It was now Mrs Clinton who “wrote too.” I was right in my feeling, yet my feeling was inadequate to the reality with which I was faced on my return to England. The Prince Consort was the hero of the hour. I had written him a line of warm congratulation, and I settled at once to the book, not only in order to be able to talk about it, but also because I could not, without personal investigation, believe that he had done all they said. But he had. It was a wonderful book--full of learning and research, acute and profound in argument, and (greatest of all surprises) eminently lucid, polished, and even brilliant in style; irony, pathos, wit--the Prince Consort had them all. I laid the second volume down, wondering no longer that he had become an authority, that his name appeared in the lists of public banquets, that he was quoted now by one, now by the other, political party, and that translations into French and German were to be undertaken by distinguished _savants_. And of course both _The Quarterly_ and _The Edinburgh_ had articles--“did him,” as his wife had phrased it. Upon which, being invited by Mrs Clinton to an evening party, I made a point of going.