QUEEN VICTORIA’S LETTERS.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19764, 15 April 1926, Page 8

QUEEN VICTORIA’S LETTERS.

Queen Victoria died on January 22, 1901, just over a quarter of a century ago. Her reputation has lost little of its prestige, though the passage of time has naturally brought about a change of perspective. The glamour of indiscriminating veneration, gathered during a reign of sixty-three years, has faded in some degree, and the decline of enthusiastic homage has given place to a saner and more valuable sentiment. Perhaps it is as a woman, a woman very typical of her age, rather than as a monarch, that we think chiefly of the 1 illustrious lady in these later years. She might not have objected to this shifting of view, though her proud and sensitive nature would not wholly relish the publicity which has been given to some of the circumstances of her private life and some of her ep : stolary observations. Together with a firmly autocratic temper she had a liking for recognition, even flattering recognition, of her femininity. This was the secret of her extravagant partiality for Disraeli. Gladstone, whose loyalty was more genuine, talked to her “as if she were a public meeting”; his rival employed a strain of honeyed and dilhjrambic worship. It is marvellous that the Queen never detected the hollowness of “Dizzy’s” obsequious pose. She would have been horrified if she had known that behind her hack he was laving down the cynical principle,

“Theie is nothing more useful than flattery, and in dealing with royalty it should fee applied with a trowel.” The second series of letters, published a few weeks ago, brings the sto*y down to the end of the ’seventies, and some years are likely to elapse before the final instalment is given to the world. There are some interesting and even piquant revelations in the recent publication, but the main trend confirms the impression conveyed by the earlier volumes. The consistency of the Queen’s character, with its contrasted strength and weakness, virtues and foibles, stands out prominently, and the essential humanity of the picture that is presented has a powerful appeal. There is nothing calculated to derogate from the old feeling of affectionate esteem, which, indeed, is quickened by the increased sense of feminine dependence and fallibility. We see the Queen in the agony of her early widowhood, struggling to perform her everyday State tasks, but yielding to paroxysms of abandoned grief. There is something almost too poignant in such words as these, written in the spring of 1862: “She sees the trees budding, the dgys lengthening, the primroses coming out, but she thinks herself still in the month of December. The Queen toils away from morning till night . . . but she wastes and pines, and there is that with in her inmost soul, which seems undermining her existence ! . . The happi-_ ness and comfort of twenty-twc years' crushed for ever; and the Queen, who did nothing, thought of nothing, without her beloved and gracious husband, who was her support, her constant companion, her guide, who helped her in everything, great and small, stands alone in her trying and difficult position, struggling to do her duty, as she will to her last hour, with a broken, bleeding heart, and with but one consolation —to rejoin him again—never to part 1” And the stricken lady had those “two dreadful old men,” Lord Russell and Lord Palmerston, “Johny” and “Pilgerstein” as she called them, ready to vex her not entirely unprejudiced soul! Perhaps she magnified the pressure of her routine duties, but the pathos of the situation is undeniable. The cloud lifted after many years, and the personal record of the ’seventies is less gloomy.