England’s Healthy Royal Family.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 858, 10 August 1888, Page 4

England’s Healthy Royal Family.

The German Crown Prince does not In.

herit Sickness from his Mother.

There is the odious insinuation that the Empress Victoria has introduced a strain of unhealthiness among the robust Hohenzollerns. Whence this persistent and prevailing slander comes it is very difficult to say.

One sees it cropping out in all kinds of places; among tho nasty gossips of tho backstairs ; in the very face of the evident fact that a family more vigorous than tho royal family of England does not exist anywhere. The work they got through in the most conscientious business-like way would kill off in a year or two a delicate or unhealthy race. Out of all her large family the Queen has had but one delicate child, the late Duke of Albany; all the rest of our Princes and Princesses are hale and hearty; no pale spectres have ever gathered about our royal board. They travel, go through the most tedious formalities, bow till our sympathetic necks ache merely to see it, stand till our sympathetic limbs tremble under us, and are ever ready to be called upon for a thousand uninteresting duties. The Queen liersolf is far from young, as must be allowed. She is a great grandmother ; but thero are not many working women who within sight of seventy would be considered capable by themselves ol- any one else of doing the work carried on by our Sovereign without either complaint or applause. We cry shame upon ourselves and each other when we find the grandmother of the cottage still toiling. Something must be done for her; that at least cannot be allowed to go on, we say. But the Queen always goes on, takes long journeys across Europe presents herself after travelling two nights in succession, untired, ready for everything, to throngs of gazing strangers, although we all know that to be stared at and crowded is not naturally agreeable to her Majesty. And it is the Queen’s daughter who is supposed to have brought a strain of weakness to the Prussian house!

The old Emperor, like many other younger potentates, was bolstered up periodically with baths aud cures. The Queen requires no Gastain, no healing and soothing'waters. I heard a whimsical story not long ago of a young servant at Windsor who had been reprimanded for falling asleep before his work was over. It was his duty to put out the lamps. ‘ Nobody oughtn’t to sit up so late,’ the young man grumbled in his self-defence. It was the Queen, busy over work, who kept this humble attendant out of bed. And the Queen’s family are like her. There is not a sickly child among her descendants. It is time that all odious whispers should be contradicted. Let the gossips name a family less subject to illness in any class of society. Nobody can do this ; but in the meantime it is easv to whisper about invisible taints where no such thing is.—St James’ Gazette.