been done that was left undone to save the life which was far dearer to her than her own. As to the public aspects of the Queen’s married life, Count Vitzthum was favoured with many disclosures from the Duchess of Cambridge. “She spoke,” writes the Count, “with tears in her eyes, of the almost unparalleled happiness of his (the Prince Consort’s) twenty years of married life, now brought to such a sudden end. In all that clear and sunny sky there was only one cloud. How gladly would the Queen have shared her crown with the husband who helped her to wear it, and was her all in all! In vain already, in Sir Robert Peel’s time, had she expressed her wish to bestow the title of King upon her husband. The constitutional scruples of the deceased Tory Minister were urged still more emphatically by Lord Palmerston when, later on, the question was again mooted. The promotion of the Prince to the title of ‘Prince Consort’ was the consequence of a compromise. Prince Albert was naturalised in 1840, and obtained, in the same year, by letters patent, precedence next to the Queen. Nevertheless, he was not a British prince, and both at Court and the Privy Council his eldest son, on attaining his majority, must have taken precedence of him. ‘For the Prince of Wales,’ as the Duke of Cambridge says, ‘is and remains Prince of Wales.’” “The value which the Queen attached to her husband’s precedence is explained by the submissive veneration she invariably showed him in great as well as small affairs. He was complete master in his house, and the active centre of an Empire whose power extends to every quarter of the globe. It was a gigantic task for a young German prince to think and act for all these millions of British subjects. All the threads were gathered together in his hands. For twenty-one years not a single despatch was ever sent from the Foreign Office which the Prince had not seen, studied, and, if necessary, altered. Not a single report of any importance from an Ambassador was allowed to be kept from him. The Secretary of State for the Colonies, the Secretary for War, the Home Secretary, the First Lord of the Admiralty--all handed to him every day just as large bundles of papers as did the Foreign Office. Everything was read, commented upon, and discussed. In addition to all this, the Prince kept up private correspondence with foreign Sovereigns, with British Ambassadors and Envoys, with the Governor-General of India, and with the Governors of the various colonies. No appointment in Church and State, in the Army or the Navy, was ever made without his approbation. At Court not the smallest thing was done without his order. No British Cabinet Minister has ever worked so hard during the Session of Parliament--and that is saying a good deal--as the Prince Consort did for twenty-one years. And the Ministers come and go; or at any rate, if frequently and long in office, as was the case with Palmerston and