"I wouldn't trust 'im a inch further than I could see 'im," was Mrs. Darling's comment on the "Merry Monarch". I complimented her on being a good judge of character. The guide had turned on the electric lights, which were fixed to shine on the silent company standing in their glass cases. William III and Mary in their purple velvet and brocades, their real point de rose and imitation jewels. The Duke of Buckingham, who died at the age of nineteen, lies on a bier in the centre of the room. The effigy lay in state at his mother's house, and one reads that she invited all her friends to see it, stating that "she could carry them in conveniently by a back door". Plain Queen Anne and "La Belle Stuart," the Duchess of Richmond, loved, in vain, by Charles II, and jealous for the posthumous reputation of her beauty. She left orders that her effigy, "as well done as could be," should be placed "under clear crown glass and none other". She should have been content to go down to posterity as the figure of Britannia on the coins. Mrs. Darling thought the Duchess would "'ave a bit of a shock if she could see 'erself now," and, indeed, I have rarely seen a more cynical comment on the glory that passes than is to be found in these weird figures in their dingy finery. Yet they have a dignity, and an exciting interest. One can approach unmolested and share the privilege of the cat who may look at a king. One may try to pierce the secrets hidden or betrayed by those waxen masks. There is Queen Elizabeth, for instance (to my mind the most arresting figure in the collection); the face is taken from a death mask, and there is something disquieting in the eyes, awful with the horror of death. A strange face, possessing in its smallness the curiously repellant qualities of great age: a face to which the kindly homeliness of Nelson's in the next case made reassuring contrast. [Illustration: WAX EFFIGIES OF QUEEN ELIZABETH AND CHARLES THE SECOND.] Mrs. Darling said "Elizabeth didn't look 'uman," and I suppose one touches on the tragedy of her life when one says that it is always as a queen, rather than as a woman, one regards her. Yet she had her feminine vanities. I have always been impressed by the account of her travelling from Richmond to Chelsea by night because the torchlight was more kind to her wrinkles than was the daylight.