Still, I do feel for her Gracious Majesty. Dear soul! Isn’t it dreadful that a gentlewoman can’t step abroad--can’t take boat, but what there’s a hundred guns blazing, firing away at her,--as if the noise of cannon and the smell of gunpowder was like the songs of nightingales and the scent of roses! How royalty keeps its hearing, I can’t tell. When the dear lady got upon the Rhine, there were the guns blazing away as though heaven and earth were come together. It’s odd enough that people will think a great noise is a great respect; and that the heartiest welcome can only be given by gunpowder. It seems that the folks were putting up a statue to a musician named Beethoven, and the Queen of England and the Prince were just in time to pay their respects to the bronze. Mr Beethoven while alive was nobody; but it’s odd how a man’s worth is raked up from his coffin! And so it’s a great comfort to great men who, when in this world, are thought very small indeed, to think how big they’ll be upon earth after they’ve gone to heaven; a comfort for ’em, when they may happen to want a coat, to think of the suit of bronze or marble that kings and queens will afterwards give ’em. If, now, there’s any English composer, any man with a mind in him, forced, for want of better employment--forced to give young ladies lessons on the piano when he should be doing sonatas and sinfonias, and that sort of thing,--why, I say, it must be a comfort to him to know that folks can honour genius when it’s put up by way of statue in the market-place. One of the prettiest stories I’ve heard of the jaunt is this, that the Queen and Albert went in a quiet way to visit the Prince’s old schoolmaster--if this isn’t enough to make all schoolmasters in England hold their heads up half a yard higher! Besides, it mayn’t show a bad example to high folks who keep tutors and governesses. Altogether the Queen must be pleased with her trip, and I should think not the less pleased where the folks made the least noise; although, from what I read in one of the papers, everybody doesn’t think so; for the writer complains that there was “no shouting or noise, only that _eternal bowing_ which so strikes a traveller, and which would make one believe that beings across the Channel were formed with some natural affinity between their right hands and their hats.” Really, to my mind there’s something more pleasing, more rational-like, in one human creature quietly bowing to another, than in shouting and hallooing at him like a wild Indian. But, then, people do so like noise!