KING EDWARD VII.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19906, 28 September 1926, Page 7

KING EDWARD VII.

INVENTOR OF MODERN SOCIETY. He was the most faithful friend, and as h© was the kindliest of msn, though not imaginative in the general acceptance of the word, yet that kindness of his seemed to giv© vision and imagination to see just when© he could use his rank to uplift and encourage the timid or anxious, to ease a difficult situation, or consolidate an uncertain one. He had an uncanny power of understanding just what some possibly insignificant person wanted him to do, or needed for complete enjoyment, and when he grasped this it was a moral certainty that he would do it. He was, writes Lady Troubridge in hep “Memories and Reflections,” the fairy prince of London society when Ennce or Wales; but he was also its benevolent autocrat, feeling the same interest in it that an inventor would feel in the perfected machine. This is no wonder, for King Edward, ao Prince of Wales, practically invented London society in the form in which it was to last for so many years. Queen Victoria stood aloof, wrapped in her griet, far away in the Highlands, or in the isle of Wight, for most of the year. She attended, of course, to matters of State, but she definitely told the English people that she had not the strength for anything else; so King Edward undertook the social headship devolving on the Crown. Ho breathed on the formal structure of society and gave it life; he made it cosmopolitan, and, having done this, he orgainated a mass of unwritten rules and regulations for its guidance, by which he elected to be bound himself as well. His tastes ■frere definite and well known, and on them the men of that day fashioned their own. He broke through the ringed fence with which men and women of high birth had hedged themselves in, and decreed that rank alone was not sufficient to make a man or woman a personage in his eyes. He gave, them their due, but nothing more, unless they possessed other attributes which interested him, and lie admitted m^n and women who had brains, talents, or beauty into th* inner circle ot Mariboiv-ugu House set*