This change in the sentiments of the public, especially its lower and more distressed portions, was promoted and accelerated by an act, equally tasteful and touching, of Her Majesty during this year. In the spring of 1842, Sir Robert Peel, now thoroughly warm in his seat as Premier, commanding a large working majority, and not yet having awakened the hostility of the decidedly Protectionist section of his followers, inaugurated that splendid series of bravely devised measures in the direction of Free Trade, of which the great Anti-Corn Law Act of four years later was, so far as he was concerned, the culmination. In 1842, Peel proposed and carried a Budget which considerably lessened the burden of Customs imposts, but the chief merit and recommendation of which consisted in the fact that it relieved the nation of the incubus of a host of very galling excise duties on such articles of common use as glass, leather, bricks, and soap. These beneficial remissions of taxation could not have been effected by him--for they entailed a heavy cost upon the revenue, already inadequate to meet the annual expenditure--but for the re-imposition of an Income Tax, a means of raising revenue which had been long disused, to the extent of sevenpence in the pound on all incomes above L150 of annual value. This, of course, did not affect the allowance made to the Sovereign. Nevertheless, Her Majesty evinced her sympathy at once with the prevailing distress and with the daring fiscal expedient of the Premier, by coming forward unsolicited to offer to receive an abatement of her income, based upon the precise scale of that imposed by Parliament upon her subjects. Up to the Queen's reign, the members of the House of Brunswick had never been peripatetic in their tendencies. The first two Georges had made frequent visits to their patrimonial German electorate, but they evinced no desire to visit England beyond the immediate environs of London. George III. never passed out of England; George IV. visited Ireland and Scotland each on one occasion; but with these exceptions, hardly any British highways were traversed by his wheels during his reign, whether as Sovereign Regent or Regnant, except the great roads connecting his capital with Windsor, Brighton, and Newmarket. William IV. was too old when he came to the throne to make it at all probable that he would evince any taste to visit any of the outlying portions of his dominions; nor did he do so. Queen Victoria, as we have copiously seen in earlier chapters, was from her very infancy habituated to moving about from place to place, and all along she has proved herself as proud as Queen Elizabeth herself of mingling with and showing herself to her people. [Sidenote: FIRST VISIT TO SCOTLAND.]