So much has lately been written about the supreme happiness of the Queen’s married life, and so much has been revealed of her inner family circle, that no more is needed to make every woman realise the anguish of the great bereavement of her life. In earlier and happier years she wrote to her uncle Leopold on the occasion of one of the Prince Consort’s short absences from her: “You cannot think how much this costs me, nor how completely forlorn I am and feel when he is away, or how I count the hours till he returns. All the numerous children are as nothing to me when he is away. It seems as if the whole life of the house and home were gone.” Poor Queen, poor woman! Surely it is ungenerous, while she so strenuously goes on working at the duties of her position, to blame her because she cannot again join in what are supposed to be its pleasures. One of the princesses lately spoke of the loneliness of the Queen. “You can have no idea,” she is reported to have said, “how lonely mamma is.” All who were her elders, and in a sense her guardians and protectors in the earlier part of her reign, have been removed by death. Her strongest affections are in the past, and with the dead. She is reported to have said on the death of one of those nearest to her: “There is no one left to call me Victoria now!” The etiquette which, in public at any rate, rules the behaviour of her children and grandchildren to the Queen, seems to render her isolation more painful than it would otherwise be. Lady Lyttelton, who was governess to the royal children, is stated in the _Greville Memoirs_ to have said that “the Queen was very fond of them, but severe in her manner, and a strict disciplinarian.” This may have perhaps increased her present loneliness, if it created a sense of reserve and formality between her children and herself.