On the 3rd of December her Majesty at Windsor personally presented several seamen and marines with the medals which they had won for conspicuous gallantry in the Ashanti War. A few days after this ceremony the attention of the country was absorbed in the first volume of the biography of the Prince Consort, which had been compiled with sedulous care, delicate tact, and refined feeling by Mr. (afterwards Sir) Theodore Martin. The verdict of the public was one of immediate and unreserved approval. They were delighted with Mr. Martin’s idyllic picture of Prince Albert’s domestic life, and of the tender companionship in which he and the Queen lived lovingly together. Glimpses, too, of the Queen’s own strength of character and of her shrewd judgment in politics, such as, for example, her letters and memoranda on the affair of the Spanish marriages, and her keenly-etched portrait of the Czar Nicholas after his visit in 1844, suggested very plainly that the Sovereign was not exactly a cipher in the State. If in some of its lines Mr. Martin’s portrait recalled memories of William III., it reminded the people that, like William III., the Prince, though unable from his intellectual detachment to inspire the people with love, won their confidence and respect through his unpretending, but unswerving fidelity to the interests of his adopted country. But the frankness and absence of reserve with which the book was written displeased a few of the Queen’s foreign relatives; indeed, this feature of the biography had been commented on by some who thought it was derogatory to the dignity of the Royal Caste. The Princess Louis of Hesse, if she did not share this opinion, felt it her duty to convey it to the Queen. In a letter to her mother at the beginning of 1875, the Princess says, “It is touching and fine in you to allow the world to have so much insight into your private life, and allow others to have what has been only _your_ property, and _our_ inheritance.... For the frivolous higher classes how valuable this book will be if read with real attention, as a record of a life spent in the highest aims, with the noblest conception of duty as a leading star.” To this letter the Queen replied from Osborne, 12th of January, 1875:--“If,” she wrote, “you will reflect a few minutes, you will see how I owed it to beloved papa to let his noble character be known and understood, as it now is, and that to wait longer when those who knew him best--his own wife, and a few (very few there are) remaining friends--were all gone, or too old and too far removed from that time, to be able to present a really true picture of his most ideal and remarkable character, would have been really wrong. He must be known for his own sake, for the good of England and of his family, and of the world at large. Countless people write to say what good it does and will do. And it is already thirteen years since he left us! Then you must also remember that endless false