reverent and almost puritanical sense of duty, though rather indifferent, perhaps, to external religious forms. The Queen had shown that she understood the distinction between Christianity and Churchianity, and hence the outcry of the extreme Anglicans against her book. The truth was that her Majesty never made any secret of her personal liking for the ministrations of Dr. A. P. Stanley, Dean of Westminster, and one of the leaders of the Broad Church Party in the Church of England. When she exhibited a similar preference for his Presbyterian friends, Dr. Norman Macleod and Principal Tulloch in the Scottish Church, her offence was complete in the eyes of violent High Churchmen. After receiving the Address based on Mr. Gladstone’s Resolution, and laying the foundation stone of the new St. Thomas’s Hospital, the Queen fled to Balmoral to recover from the nervous excitement of political warfare. It unfortunately happened that when the Scottish Members in discussing the Scottish Reform Bill substituted a household franchise pure and simple for a rating franchise, a Ministerial crisis was produced. Mr. Disraeli, in fact, desired authority to coerce Members by threatening a dissolution. For this purpose he had to consult the Queen, and certainly the three days lost in communicating with Balmoral gave rise to some inconvenience. This tempted Mr. Reardon, M.P. for Athlone, in the interests of the West End tradesmen, to put a question on the notice-paper of the House of Commons, as to the cause of the Queen’s absence from the capital. The Speaker, however, refused to let it appear, because it impudently suggested her Majesty’s abdication in favour of the Prince of Wales. In June the Queen had recovered her health, and on the 22nd she gave a brilliant garden party at Buckingham Palace. Six hundred invitations were issued, and she received her company, says Lord Malmesbury, “very graciously.” She was, he adds, “looking remarkably well, and everybody said she seemed to enjoy her party.” Two days before that she had reviewed 27,000 Volunteers in Windsor Park. This affair was very badly managed. There were no commissariat arrangements, and there was no ambulance. Hungry officers wandered away to get food, and when the marching past was over, some of the troops--faint from hunger and thirst, and having lost their leaders--ignored discipline altogether, and on the return to Datchet Station heaped vituperation on any officers of rank they came across. On the 9th of July both Houses of Parliament congratulated the Queen on the birth of a little grand-daughter, who had been brought into the world by the Princess of Wales on the 6th. On the same evening (the 9th) the Duke of Edinburgh, who had brought his ship, the _Galatea_, home, landed at Osborne and dined with the Queen; and on the 13th she visited her son’s vessel, which she inspected under his guidance.