The Queen would at once, and of her own motion, have ordered a public funeral, with the highest honours of State, for the remains of the illustrious dead, following the precedent set in the case of Nelson. She, however, [Illustration: THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON. (_After the Portrait by Count D’Orsay._)] deemed that a solemn vote of Parliament would confer additional distinction on the ceremony. It was thus determined that the body of the Duke should lie in the custody of a Guard of Honour until both Houses of Parliament could meet in November and pass a resolution in favour of burying, in St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Victor of Waterloo by the side of the Victor of the Nile. The pages of _Hansard_ are full of the glowing tributes to the memory of the great Duke, paid by the foremost orators of the Senate. Of these, one of the most brilliant came from Mr. Disraeli, and it subsequently gave rise to a good deal of scandal. A morning paper published a translation--said to come from the pen of the late Mr. Abraham Hayward, Q.C.--of the eulogium passed by M. Thiers in the French Chamber on the Emperor Napoleon I. This certainly bore such a suspiciously close resemblance to Mr. Disraeli’s oration, that the English orator was accused of plagiarism. But the highest tribute of homage to the Duke of Wellington came from the English people, to whom the Duke seemed to embody all the manly virtues of their race. To this fact Mr. Cobden himself bears striking, though grudging, testimony in a letter to his friend Mr. Thomasson, of Bolton, condemning the militant policy which led to an ever-increasing war expenditure. “Let as ask ourselves candidly,” he writes, “whether the country at large is in favour of any other policy than that which has been pursued by the aristocracy, Whig and Tory, for a century and a half? The man who impersonated that policy more than any other was the Duke of Wellington, and I had the daily opportunity of witnessing, at the Great Exhibition last year, that all other objects of interest sank to insignificance, even in that collection of a world’s wonders, when he made his entry into the Crystal Palace. The frenzy of admiration and enthusiasm which took possession of a hundred thousand people of all classes at the very announcement of his name, was one of the most impressive lessons I ever had of the real tendencies of the English character.”[61]