On the 26th of August the Court went to Balmoral, from whence, just before Parliament was prorogued, she addressed to the Ministry a strong Memorandum drawing attention to the frequency with which railway accidents were occurring, and urging that steps should be taken to provide travellers with better security for safety. In October she held many anxious consultations with Lord Granville and Lord Hartington on the state of Ireland, where the increase in outrages, such as the savage murders of Mr. Boyd and Lord Mountmorres[168] gave her great pain. The result was that Lord Hartington, when he arrived in London from Balmoral on the 11th of October, was immediately visited by Mr. Gladstone and Lord Granville, and in political circles it was soon rumoured that the Irish Government was about to prosecute the leaders of the Irish Land League. On the 10th of October the Queen and Princess Beatrice went to spend a few days amidst the snowdrifts of the Glassalt Sheil. The Court returned to Windsor on the 17th of December, to find the world--for a time at least--talking of something else besides Irish outrages. Lord Beaconsfield had just published his last brilliant and audacious political novel, “Endymion,” in what one of its characters describes as “the Corinthian style, in which the Mænad of Mr. Burke was habited in the last mode of Almack’s.” The town was in raptures over a burlesque of Society, which blended together into amusing personalities such opposite characters as Cardinal Wiseman and Cardinal Manning; Lord Palmerston and Sidney Herbert; Poole the tailor, and Hudson the railway king; which made Prince Bismarck tilt with Napoleon III. at the Eglinton Tournament; which idealised the author as Endymion, Lady Beaconsfield as Imogen, and Napoleon III. as Prince Florestan; which travestied Lady Palmerston as Zenobia, caricatured Thackeray cleverly but spitefully as Mr. St. Barbe, and George Smythe cleverly but not spitefully as Waldershare. [Illustration: BALLATER.]