triumph for Palmerston. The cry had been "Palmerston, and nothing but Palmerston;" and he had carried everything before him. Within the ranks of the Liberal party all his leading opponents, Bright and Cobden representing the Manchester School, lost their seats. But in less than a year the seemingly all-powerful Minister was defeated because he had not maintained with sufficient dignity the honor and independence of England. "Old Civis Romanus," as he had been nicknamed, was said to have retreated ignominiously; the British Lion was depicted with his tail between his legs. There was a strong outburst of dissatisfaction; for once Palmerston had not been sufficiently pugnacious: his Government was swept away, and was replaced by that of Lord Derby.

The Queen and Prince from the first took an immense interest in the Volunteers; they had always anxiously watched the relatively small military strength of England, and had urged on successive Governments. the overwhelming importance of not allowing it to sink to a level incompatible with national security. The spontaneous growth of a great service for internal defence gave them, therefore, peculiar satisfaction, as affording evidence that at heart the spirit of the country was as sound as it had been in the days of the Armada. The Queen reviewed the English Volunteers in Hyde Park in June, 1860. The cheering was so tremendous that Her Majesty was quite overcome. She inaugurated the National Rifle Association in the following month; and she reviewed the Scottish Volunteers on Arthur's Seat in August of the same

year.

It was a splendid sight; 22,000 magnificent men, the flower of a hardy and spirited race; the surrounding amphitheatre of the hillside crowded with a cheering multitude: no wonder that the Queen was

thrilled with pride and thankfulness. The Duchess of Kent was with her daughter; the Queen writes that she was so delighted, "dear mamma could be present at this memorable and never-to-be-forgotten occasion." It was the last time they were together at any public ceremonial.

Lord Tennyson interpreted the national feeling by his song, "Riflemen, form!" and the lines

"True, we have got such a faithful ally

That only the Devil can tell what he means

exactly describe the sentiments of most Englishmen towards Louis Napoleon. It was said that a foreigner expressed surprise at the military spirit displayed at one of these Volunteer reviews, and said he had understood that the English were a nation of shopkeepers. A jolly countryman replied, "So they are, Moosoo; and these are the boys that keep the shop!"

The Volunteer movement has proved no mere flash in the pan, caused by a sudden explosion of passing irritation. It has grown and strengthened, and now, after twenty-six years of existence, it adds more than 200,000 men to the internal defences of the country. The annual meeting of the National Rifle Association has furnished proof to the world that the Volunteer force contains a body of skilled marksmen, who, under able generalship, might turn the scale in many a battle.

A

CHAPTER XV.

THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH.

THE year 1861 closed the book of the happy wedded life of the Queen. The hand of death lay heavy upon her, and took from her first her mother, and then her husband. The death of her mother was her first very great sorrow. Her half-brother, Prince Charles of Leiningen, had died in 1856; but his life and hers, during his latter years, had lain very much apart, and though she mourned him deeply and truly, he had not made part of her life, and his death could not be to her what the death of her mother was, who had watched over her from childhood, and with whom she passed part of almost every day; still less could it bring the loneliness and desolation in which the Queen was left by the death of her husband, "her dearest life in life," as she had called him.

The Duchess of Kent died in March, 1861. There is no consolation in being told that such a loss is common. It is not common to the heart that has to bear it. The Queen felt, as all must feel when death takes from them a beloved parent, that part of her life was gone which nothing could restore. She wrote in the diary so often quoted:

66 How awful! How mysterious! But what a blessed end! Her gentle spirit at rest, her sufferings over! But I-I, wretched childwho had lost the mother I so tenderly loved, from whom for these fortyone years I had never been parted except for a few weeks, what was my case? My childhood — everything seemed to crowd upon me at once. I seemed to have lived through a life, to have become old! What I had dreaded and fought off the idea of for years, had come, and must be borne. The blessed future meeting, and her peace and rest, must henceforward be my comfort."

In a letter to her uncle, the King of the Belgians, now the last survivor of his generation, the Queen wrote that she felt "so truly orphaned." The Queen was sustained in her sorrow by the tender sympathy of her husband and of her daughter, the Princess Alice, whose strong and beautiful character, already well known in her home circle, was to be revealed to the nation a few months later. The Princess was now entering on womanhood, and had recently been betrothed to Prince Louis of Hesse, nephew of the reigning Grand Duke. After her lamented death in 1878, a volume, with extracts from her letters to the Queen, was published as a memorial. In these she repeatedly recurs to the fact that when the Duchess of Kent died, the Prince Consort took his daughter by the hand and led her to the Queen, and told her she must comfort mamma. A few months later, when the place in the Palace of the husband and father was vacant, the Princess recalled these words, and accepted them as a sacred trust and bequest. She nobly justified the confidence her father had reposed in her. this earlier bereavement it was her office to comfort and sustain the Queen, who wrote: "Dear, good Alice was full of intense feeling, tenderness, and distress for me; she, and all of them, loved grandmamma so dearly.

66

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In

The Queen and Prince appreciated fully all that the former had owed to her mother, the watchful vigilance and wisdom with which, from the date of her husband's death, in 1820, the Duchess had devoted herself to the one object of preparing her baby daughter for the great future which awaited her. Stockmar had been her friend from the hour of her bereavement; it was from him that she learned that the illness of her husband could have no other than a fatal termination; he had stood by her through the long years of

her loneliness, surrounded as she was by difficulties, jealousies, and misrepresentations; he had always appreciated her warm heart and innate truthfulness. He wrote of her that "she was by sheer natural instinct truthful, affectionate, and friendly, unselfish, sympathetic, and even magnanimous." All these testimonies to her worth were recalled now with gratitude and love by the sorrowing Queen. She was deprived of one solace which she might have had, the presence of her half-sister, Princess Feodore of Hohenlohe, the only other surviving child of the Duchess. She had recently been left a widow (April, 1860), and could not leave Germany.

Lady Augusta Bruce (afterwards Lady Augusta Stanley) had been one of the Duchess's ladies-inwaiting, and had been almost a daughter to her in love, and more than her own daughter could be in tender, watchful service. The Queen now transferred Lady Augusta to her own household, nominally as Resident Bed-Chamber Woman, really as assistant secretary; and from this time a very strong bond of affection was established between them, which was unbroken until Lady Augusta's death. The Queen also received help and consolation from the presence of her eldest daughter, the Princess Royal, who hurried to her parents on hearing of their loss. But notwithstanding all consolations, the Queen's heart was very sore, and her faithful, tender nature is one which clings with tenacious gratitude to the memory of precious friends hid in death's dateless night. Eleven years after her mother's death, Her Majesty's journal for the 17th August, 1872, has the following entry: "Beloved mamma's birthday. That dear mother, so loving and tender and full of kindness! How often I long for that love!" The Queen did not attend her mother's funeral. "I and my girls," she