Her words were few and well chosen. You were never puzzled to know what she meant, and she expected you, in what you said, to be equally concise and clear—exact in the expression of opinion, and rigidly accurate as to fact. Her aim always was to get at the truth. Herself the most truthful of women, she resented any shortcoming in truthfulness in others. "Oh!" she once said to me, "nobody can tell of what value it is to me to hear the truth."

The Queen's intolerance of affectation, verbosity, or obscurity of language affected her judgment not only of men, but also of much of the contemporary literature which found favour with others. She loved and appreciated, and indeed delighted in poetry, but it must be poetry as the vehicle of genuine feeling or wholesome and instructive thought, clothed in the musical language which ingratiates it to the memory, without the inversions or obscurity of phrase or the exaggerations of metaphor or sentiment, which are so often mistaken for originality and strength. In my experience, Her Majesty was not prone to offer critical opinions upon books, but when she did so, her judgments were to the point. Thus, in speaking to me about George Eliot's Middlemarch, she remarked, after saying much about the subtle delineation of the various characters, "After all, fine as it is, it is a disappointing book; all the people are failures"—meaning not in the way they were drawn, but in the issues of their lives, as in truth they are.

The Queen knew, I should say, quite as much of literature, music, and the arts as most of the people who think themselves entitled to speak with authority upon all these topics; but she knew the limitations of her own knowledge, and was much too sincere and too modest to affect authority to dilate upon them. This she left to those who had made them their special study, and was

or think they understand. She had no leisure for abstruse studies. She had one great book always before her, which commanded and absorbed her supreme attention—the book of human life, of human good and ill within her kingdom, and of all that was going on in Europe and throughout her vast dominions. The study of that book left little leisure for great attainments in literature, science, or the arts.

To music she had been devoted from her youth. She had grown up in the love of the chief Italian composers, ancient and modern, of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer, and Verdi in the modern school—in short, all the great masters of melody who wrote from and to the heart. It was not, then, surprising that she cared comparatively little for the writers of the latest school, Wagner, Brahms, Grieg, and others, who write much less from the heart than from the head, building up elaborately scientific tonic structures, the symmetry of which it is difficult to trace, and weaving complicated harmonies that tax and exhaust the attention, and savour more of the science than of the soul of music. However indifferent the Queen might be to productions of this class, she was keenly alive to every piece of pure melodic and harmonious inspiration.

Of Her Majesty's executive power as an artist I cannot speak, as what I know of her work is confined to a few slight sketches, and the etchings which she made, when Prince Albert and herself were for a time fascinated by that attractive but difficult process. Of these I owe to the Queen's kindness a complete series.[6] Of them it is enough to say that the drawing is not remarkable, and that, as etchings, the difficulties of the art have not been overcome. But I had frequent occasion to observe that Her Majesty's studies had resulted in a power of judging good artistic work beyond that of even the tolerably accomplished amateur. She was in the constant habit of having engravings made of the portraits of her family and friends, for private circulation, and for several years I acted, by her desire, as the medium of communication between her and the brothers Francis and William Holl, the eminent engravers, by whom the work was done. The engravers' proofs of these, always carefully scrutinised by the Queen, were never returned to me without some pertinent comment, sometimes illustrated by a drawing by the Queen upon the margin. "None but an artist could have made that suggestion" was a not uncommon remark of the engraver. It showed him how to correct something which he himself had not seen the way to amend.

With so much to do and think of, Her Majesty was entitled to expect from her Ministers that all important matters submitted for her consideration should be explained in language at once lucid and concise. This, no doubt, was generally done. But a very remarkable instance to the contrary came under my notice while I was lying ill at Osborne. The Irish Church Disestablishment question, which in 1867 had been much agitated, took the shape, in January 1868, of a bill, the printed draft of which, together with a letter explanatory of the measure, was sent by Mr Gladstone to the Queen. Her Private Secretary, General Grey, must have been absent from Osborne at the time, otherwise the Queen would have turned to him for aid in clearing up any difficulty she found in mastering these documents. I was therefore surprised to receive a note from Her Majesty, sending them to me, requesting me to read and return them with a précis of their contents, as she had read and re-read Mr Gladstone's very long letter, and found herself more and more lost in the clouds of his explanations the more she toiled through them. My opinion of the measure, of course, was not asked for—it never was upon any subject where her Ministers were properly her advisers—and Her Majesty knew she could rely on my secrecy in regard to its terms as implicitly as if I had been sworn of her Privy Council. My task was simply to analyse and state as clearly as I could the scope of the measure as I might gather it from the documents sent. That the Queen should have been lost in the fog of the long and far from lucid sentences of her Minister, running, as they did, through upwards of a dozen closely written quarto pages, seemed only natural. I therefore turned from them to the draft bill, and long professional experience in the study of similar documents made it easy for me to furnish Her Majesty with the information desired, for which I presently received a gracious acknowledgment, with the happy assurance that she now saw her way clearly to deal with the measure proposed.

This incident, long forgotten, was recalled to my mind on reading the statement made with an air of assured knowledge,[7] that the Queen's "prejudice" against Mr Gladstone began from her "suspecting him of trying to overwork her." I have the best reason to know the groundlessness of this imputation. The Queen's distrust of Mr Gladstone—not her "prejudice" against him—was of a much earlier date than his first Premiership. It was deeply seated, and for reasons that grew more and more serious as the years rolled on. But this is a matter with which the future chronicler of the Queen's Life may be left to deal. Instead of