PRESENTATION TO THE QUEEN.

Waikato Times, Volume IV, Issue 248, 11 December 1873, Page 2

PRESENTATION TO THE QUEEN.

Thk ceremony of presentation to the Queen is quite the same as that at jv Prince of W^les's levee. The spelling clasß of royal ladies stand up in a rigid row. On the Queen's right hand is the Lord Chamberlain, who reads of! the names. Next to the Queen, on her left, is Alexandra, then the Queen's daughters and the Princess Mary of Cambridge. Next to them stand the princes, and the whole is a phalanx which stretches entirely across the room. Behind this line, drawn up in battle array, stand three or four ranks of court ladies. The act of presentation is very easy and simple. Formerly— indeed, until within a few years— it must have been a very perilous and important feat. The courtier (the term is used inaccurately, but there is no name to describe a person who goes to court for a single time) was compelled to walk up a long room, and to back, bowing, out of the Queen's presence. For ladies who had trails to manage the ordeal must have been a trying one. Now it has been made quite easy. There is but one point in which a presentation to the Queen diffeis from that already described at the Prince of Wales's levee. You may turn your back to the Prince, but after bowing to the Queen you step off into the crowd, stil facing her. There (if you had the good luck to bo presented m the diplomatic circle) you may stand and watch a most interesting pageant. To the young royalties, perhaps, it is not reiy amusing, though they evidently have their little joke afterward over anything unusual that occurs. It is natural enough that they should, of course, and the fatigue which they sustain entitles them to all the anuißeinent they can get out of what must be to them a very monotonous and familiar spectacle. There is pienty m it to occupy and interest the man who sees it for the tiret or second time You do not have to ask who is this, or who is that ? The Lord Chamberlaiu announces each person as he or she appears. You hear the most heroic and romantic names in English history as some insignificant boy 01 wizened old won'an appears to represent them. They a»e not all, by any means, insignificant boys or wizened old women. Many of the ladies are handsome enough to be well worth looking at, whether their names be Percy, or Stanhope, or Urown, or Smith. The young slips of giils who come to be piusentcd for the first time, frightened and pale or flushed, one adinues and feels a sense of instinctive loyalty to Tho name of each is called out loudly by the Lord Chamberlain : The Duchess of Fincastle, the Countess of Dorchester, Lady Arabella Darling on her marriage, &c. The ladies bow \ cry low, and those to whom the Queen gives her hand to kiss ne.-uly or quite touch their knee to the carpet. No act of homage to the Queen over seems exaggerated, her behaviour being so modest and the sympathy with her so wjde and sincere ; but ladies veiy nearly kneel ill shaking hauds witli any member of the royal family, not only at court, but el&ewhere. It is not no strange-looking, the kneeling to a royal lady, but to see a stately mother or «ome soft maiden rendering such an act of homage to a chit of a boy or a gioss young gentleman unpi esses one unpleasantly. The couitcsy of a lady to a prince or princess is something between kneeling and that queer genuflection one meets in the English agiicultural districts ; the props of the boys and girls seemed momentaiily to be knocked away, and they suddenly catch themselves in descending. It astonished mo, I remember, at a court party, to gee one patrician young woman— " divinely tall" I should describe her if her decided chin and the evidently Roman turn of her nose and of her character had not put divinity out of the question— shake hands with a uot very imposing young piinee, and bend her legal knees into this curious and budden little cramp. I saw her, this adventurous little maid, some daj s afterwards in a hansom cab (shade of her graudmothei, think of it ') directing with her impenous parasol the cabby to this and that shop. It struck mo she bhould h.u c been a Boman damsel, and have drivtn j a chaiiot uith three bttwls ahua^t. — LippiMott'i. Mctga-