end of it was that Sir Robert Peel declined to undertake to form a Government, and Lord Melbourne was recalled; he had been in a very weak position before; but he was still further weakened by the events that had just taken place. In after years the Queen, with her accustomed generosity, took the whole blame upon herself. Curiously enough, it was Lord John Russell, who had, in 1839, encouraged the Queen in the line she took on the Bedchamber question, who asked her in 1854, if she had not been advised by some one else in the matter. “She replied with great candor and _naïveté_, ‘No, it was entirely my own foolishness.’” These events excited the whole country to an extraordinary degree, and it is not astonishing that they were intensely absorbing to the Queen, and that she therefore, for the time, dismissed from her mind all thoughts of marriage. Indeed, she wrote to her uncle Leopold in July, 1839, stating very strongly her intention to defer her marriage for some years. To Stockmar also the Queen expressed the same intention. These diplomatists do not appear to have argued the matter with Her Majesty; but they thought they knew how to shake her resolution. She had only once seen her cousin Albert, when he had come over to England with his father and his elder brother, Ernest, for a few weeks’ visit to the Duchess of Kent, in 1836. He was then a boy, very stout, as the Queen herself has told us, but amiable, natural, unaffected, and merry. He had now (1839) greatly improved in appearance and developed in character, and Leopold determined on sending him to England again on a second visit to his cousin. After his first visit the Princess, as she then was, had written to her uncle Leopold in a strain which showed that she thought her future marriage with her cousin Albert was a practical certainty; she begged her uncle “to take care of the health of one now so dear to me, and to take him under your special protection;” and she added she trusted “all would go prosperously and well on this subject, now of so much importance to me.”