"As the night wore on into the morning," again to quote her majesty's diary, "I lay down on the sofa at the foot of my bed, where at least I could lie still. I heard each hour strike, the cock crow, the dogs barking at a distance. Every sound seemed to strike into one's inmost soul. What would dearest Mama have thought of our passing a night under her roof, and she not to know it! At four I went down again. All still-nothing to be heard but the heavy breathing, and the striking, at every quarter, of the old repeater, a large watch in a tortoise-shell case, which had belonged to my poor father, the sound of which brought back all the recollections of my childhood, for I always used to hear it at night, but had not heard it for now twenty-three years! I remained kneeling and standing by that beloved parent, whom it seemed too awful to see hopelessly leaving me, till half-past four, when, feeling faint and exhausted, I went upstairs again and lay down in silent misery, during which I went through in thought past times, and the fearful coming ones, with the awful blank which would make such an inroad into our happy family life."

About half-hast seven the queen returned to the duchess's room, where the end was now visibly approaching. There was no return of consciousness. About eight o'clock, again to quote the queen's diary, "Albert took me out of the room for a short while, but I could not remain. When I returned the window was wide open and both doors. I sat on a footstool, holding her dear hand. . . . Meantime the dear face grew paler (though, in truth, her cheeks had that pretty fresh colour they always had, up to within half-an-hour of the last), the features longer, sharper. The breathing became easier. I fell on my knees, hold

ing the beloved hand, which was still warm and soft, though heavier, in both of mine. I felt the end was fast approaching, as Clark went out to call Albert and Alice, I only left gazing on that beloved face, and feeling as if my heart would break. . . It was a solemn, sacred, never-to-be-forgotten scene.

"Fainter and fainter grew the breathing. At last it ceased; but there was no change of countenance, nothing; the eyes closed, as they had been for the last half-hour. . . . The clock struck half-past nine at the very moment. Convulsed with sobs, I fell upon the hand, and covered it with kisses. Albert lifted me up and took me into the next room, himself entirely melted into tears, which is unusual for him, deep as his feelings are, and clasped me in his arms. I asked if all was over; he said, 'Yes!'

done before,

"I went into the room again after a few minutes, and gave one look. My darling mother was sitting as she had but was already white! O God! How awful! How mysterious! But what a blessed end! Her gentle spirit at rest, her sufferings over! But I, I, wretched child!-who had lost the mother I so tenderly loved, from whom for these forty-one years I had never been parted except for a few weeks, what was my casel 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."

If anything could soothe the feelings of her child at such an hour, it would have been to see how loved and how mourned the Duchess of Kent was by every member of her household, from the highest to the lowest. Some of them had been in her service for more than thirty years, and there was not one but felt that in her a dear friend had been lost. When, as evening drew on, the hour came for the queen and prince to leave the house, endeares to them by so many associations, and go to Windsor Castle, they left it through a crowd of familiar faces bathed in tears, every one of whom had some special link of association

with her, whom they were to see no more. "It was," as the record already quoted notes, "a fearful moment. All lit up, as when we had arrived the night before. I clung to the dear room, to the house, to all,-and the arriving at Windsor Castle was dreadful."1

The princess royal set out from Berlin as soon as the sad intelligence reached her, and her presence and the faithful affection of the prince consort, helped to comfort the heart of the queen. It is a merciful condition of our present existence that we cannot foresee the trials which we are to meet, or the advancing shadows of that fatal year would have overwhelmed the royal wife and mother.

The Prince Consort had long been in poor health. He suffered from imperfect digestion, from weakness, from rheumatic pains, from sleeplessness. He had never allowed himself enough of actual repose. Even his recreations appear to have been taken with a kind of methodical determination to make use of them as another kind of duty. He seems to have perpetually saddled himself with official harness. In the latter days of his life the training of his old tutor Baron Stockmar began to show its weak side. Stockmar had a notion that he could settle and define the political positions and proper methods of government of all the countries of Europe if the rulers and the people would but listen to his philosophic interference. Prince Albert was too wise to be a meddler, but he was always anxious to be doing something to help on the government of the country, and his sagacity was really often of so much importance both to the queen and to the ministry, while his tact in avoiding the assumption of authority was so good, that he was prone to undertake an amount of public business which his physical powers were unable to sustain. Unhappily he continued to work in spite of symptoms which should have sent him at once to rest and to careful nursing. His was not a physique to bear pain or to recover quickly from the weakness caused by want of sleep and want of digestive power, but he had the courage to act as though he was comparatively free from suffering. An

1 The Queen's Diary; Life of the Prince Consort.

entry now and then in his diary attested that he felt ill-wretched-depressed. The queen was anxious, and those immediately associated with the royal family feared that his condition was such as to render him liable to more serious illness should he be exposed to any exciting cause of disease. The prince never seemed to have what one may call a grip on life. His physical vitality was low. People of great physical vitality may work on through pain and sickness and temporary feebleness by sheer force of will and recuperative power; on the other hand people of low vitality may, by moral courage, refuse to notice the weakness that is creeping on them and will work on in spite of it. In these respects the same apparent results may be attained by self-assertion and by self-suppression. Prince Albert was well aware of his own constitutional tendency. I do not cling to life. You do; but I set no store by it," he had said to the queen in the course of a conversation not very long before his fatal illness. "If I knew that those I love were well cared for, I should be quite ready to die to-morrow. had a severe illness I should should not struggle for life. city of life."

I am sure if I give up at once, I I have no tena

Whether he had already become affected by low or gastric fever when he went, weak and "out of sorts," to Sandhurst on the 27th of November, 1861, to inspect the buildings for the Staff College and Royal Military Academy then in progress, could not be positively declared. It was, however, to that journey, made while he was in a condition to receive injury from fatigue or exposure or other deleterious influences, that the subsequent character of the illness was attributed. It was but three or four hours' drive from Windsor to Sandhurst and back, but the weather was tempestuous with incessant rain. Still there seemed to be little to apprehend, and though his sleeplessness continued, and he felt tired and uncomfortable, he went out shooting with Prince Ernest of Leiningen the next day. On the Sunday his discomfort and feeling of illness continued, but on the Monday he visited the Prince of Wales at Cambridge, returning on the following day. The weather was still

very stormy, and on his again arriving at Windsor he was much prostrated. He would not treat himself as an invalid, however, and as at that time there was much excitement because of the serious dispute with America about the seizure of Mr. Mason and Mr. Slidell on board the Trent (a matter to which we shall presently have to refer) he was almost constantly occupied in conference or correspondence with members of the government. The last thing ever written by the prince were alterations and amendments which he proposed should be made in the despatch sent from the government to Lord Lyons as our representative at Washington, and it was to the impression caused by his representations that the success of the despatch was largely attributed.

The illness of the prince increased, and though he appeared amidst the guests at Windsor Castle, among whom were Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone, the Duc de Nemours and Lord Carlisle, he suffered much from weakness and depression. He slept little, felt chilly and wretched, and could take very little food. Still he observed his usual habits of industry, and the morning after the arrival of the proposed despatches to Lord Lyons at Washington, rose at seven o'clock to write the memorandum containing the amendments which he submitted to the queen.

By the time that a letter reached him from the ministers, speaking in high terms of the draft containing these amendments, he was

worse.

On the morning of the 2d of December Dr. Jenner was sent for, and was followed by Sir James Clark. The prince was unable to appear at dinner, and Lord Palmerston, who with the Duke of Newcastle and Sir Allan M'Nab from Canada had arrived as guests, was much distressed, and urged that a third physician should be sent for. This was not thought to be necessary, and for two or three days afterwards there was much hope that the disorder might take a favourable turn without the development of fever, of which the prince himself had a peculiar dread. Unhappily these hopes were frustrated. after day, though there were many symptoms that appeared to be not unfavourable to his

Day

recovery, the fluctuations of the disorder gave rise to serious apprehensions. Dr. Watson and Sir Henry Holland were called in. All that medical skill could accomplish was doubtless secured, but the depressed condition of the prince, his inability to take food, his prostration from want of sleep, and that want of vital force were against him. Lord Palmerston, and indeed every member of the government, nay, all to whom the intelligence of the patient's condition was conveyed, felt the greatest grief and anxiety.

It may be imagined what days of sorrow those must have been to the queen herself, who, with the Princess Alice, was there to watch and soothe and read to him while he could bear it; and who, when the last sad hours came, would only leave his bedside for the adjoining room. We can do no more than record the great and solemn grief of the tender devoted wife, and the sorrow of the loving daughter. In the simple words of her own diary her majesty afterwards wrote of those parting hours, and they are the words of a heart-stricken woman, who yet, with the selfcontrol that is one of her queenly virtues, gave way to outbursts of sorrow only in private, and sat outwardly calm and ready for whispered word or sign, with the beloved head leaning upon her shoulder, the hand clasped in her own.

Early on the morning of Saturday the 14th of December the prince's appearance had indicated some rallying of his powers, and physicians and attendants were striving to hope that the crisis might pass favourably, but during the day the symptoms became unmistakable. As the evening advanced her majesty retired to give way to her grief in the adjoining room. She had not long been gone when a rapid change set in, and the Princess Alice was requested by Sir James Clark to ask her majesty to return. The import of the summons was too plain. When the queen entered she took the prince's left hand, “which was already cold, though the breathing was quite gentle," and knelt down by his side. On the other side of the bed was the Princess Alice, while at its foot knelt the Prince of Wales (who had been summoned from Cam

53

Helena. Not far from the foot of the bed were Prince Ernest Leiningen, the physicians, and the prince's valet Löhlein. General the Hon. Robert Bruce knelt opposite to the queen, and the Dean of Windsor, Sir Charles Phipps, and General Grey, were also in the

room.

"In the solemn hush of that mournful chamber there was such grief as has rarely hallowed any death-bed. A great light, which had blessed the world, and which the mourners had but yesterday hoped might long bless it, was waning fast away. A husband, a father, a friend, a master, endeared by every quality by which man in such relations can win the love of his fellow-man, was passing into the Silent Land, and his loving glance, his wise counsels, his firm manly thought should be known among them no more. The castle clock chimed the third quarter after ten. Calm and peaceful grew the beloved form; the features settled into the beauty of a perfectly serene repose; two or three long, but gentle, breaths were drawn; and that great soul had fled, to seek a nobler scope for its aspirations in the world within the veil, for which it had often yearned, where there is rest for the weary, and where 'the spirits of the just are made perfect."""

These words, quoted from the closing chapter of the record which the queen herself directed and approved, need no eulogistic addition here. When the great bell of St. Paul's tolled for the death of the prince who had outlived false reproach and lived down all but the basest suspicion, it struck its deep note to every heart that heard it, and its solemn echo sounded through the empire. The queen did not mourn alone. The whole nation sorrowed with her. Men went about speaking low, women wept, and even children looked with wistful faces and felt the shadow of a great grief when they heard that "Prince Albert," whose portrait they had seen in almost every street, whose name had been associated with nearly all that had been told of new parks, and schools, orphanages, and

1 Life of the Prince Consort, by Sir Theodore Martin.

Realizing what manner of man Prince Albert was, and truly estimating the work of his that should live after him, and the memory of him that would be most likely to endure, there could scarcely have been a better or more just and appropriate tribute to his memory than that delivered by Mr. Gladstone in his address before the Association of Lancashire and Cheshire Mechanics' Institutes at Manchester, on the 23d of April, 1862, and therefore shortly after the death of the prince and during the pressure of the cotton famine. The occasion, the audience, the circumstances, were such as would well serve to turn men's thoughts to the bereavement which the country had so recently sustained. We may at least see in the words themselves some reflection of what was felt and of what even now continues to be felt in relation to a loss which was a national calamity. Mr. Gladstone said :—

"In many a humble cottage, darkened by the calamity of the past winter, the mourning inhabitants may have checked their own impatience by reflecting that, in the ancient palace of our kings, a woman's heart lay bleeding; and that to the supreme place in birth, in station, in splendour, and in power, was now added another and sadder title of preeminence in grief.