fondly, and sadly look back upon? If any one had ventured to prophesy that this untried youth and foreigner was to be foremost in the ranks of every form of intelligence, foremost in plans of active philanthropy, foremost in diligence, order, and judgment, in purity of morals, and the practice of every domestic virtue, he would have been scouted as a dreamer of dreams. A youth just twenty years of age, and yet fully furnished in every scholarly department of learning and taste; a modern German Prince, and yet the worshipper of constitutional laws and the friend of progress; inexperienced in the art of life, exalted in station, and suddenly exalted in fortune; possessing great personal advantages, and ushered into a gay and luxurious court, and yet not one blot on his moral escutcheon; royal, yet disdaining every royal road to attainment and every traditional royal right to self-indulgence. Surely we may be pardoned for not readily believing in a character which the history of princes and of mankind had doubly proved to be fabulous!

The country had had no opportunity of knowing anything of Prince Albert before he became a suitor for our young Queen; nor scarcely more between the 16th November, 1839, when Her Majesty announced him to the Privy Council as the object of her choice in words of trust now made touching by their subsequent fulfilment, and the 10th February, 1840, when this most auspicious marriage took place. A few days before the wedding ceremonial the Duke of Wellington said in the House of Lords, with his customary plainness, It appears to me that the public ought to know something beyond the name of Prince Albert ;' and truly it does appear strange now that there should have been so little curiosity shown on the subject. Books appeared, ephemeral in their character, giving a history of the House of SaxeCoburg and Gotha, where, if ancestry goes for anything, every possible guarantee might have been found for some at least of the sterling qualities we have since learned to revere in their descendant. No men of straw-no mere royal images-those progenitors equally of the young Bride and Bridegroom: Frederick the Wise, John the Constant, John Frederick the Magnanimous, Prince Electors of Saxony, who toiled, and bled, and suffered bonds and imprisonment, and sentence of ignominious death, and loss of state and realm, for the Protestant cause at the Reformation. But loyalty, then-a-days, was accustomed to dispense with very earnest convictions. These facts, therefore, went little beyond the surface, and perhaps went not so far.

Even the character of the Prince's uncle, Leopold of the Belgians, did not stand then where it does now. A silly rumour

that

that Prince Albert was a Roman Catholic, founded ostensibly on the marriage of his cousin to the Queen of Portugal, and on our Queen's not having declared the form of religion to which he belonged, obtained a worthless belief; but otherwise he arrived in England with a reputation, for better and for worse, still to make.

The first distinct sentiments he may be said to have inspired were those of commiseration at the supposed thanklessness of his position. But Pity here was not akin to Love, and it was by no very complimentary logic that a man precluded from the stir of politics was concluded, by the national ignorance and vanity, to have no sphere at all. Here, again, no human prescience could have guessed how far higher was the ambition of this unknown young man than anything which the coarse strife of politics could have satisfied. It was well, however, that even these nobler aims were not impatient of realisation. At every point a jealous insular nation, visiting upon the stranger all the mistrust which previous generations of Princes had inspired, confronted him— ready to do all loyal and courteous homage, but sternly requiring to be slowly and really convinced before they would more than nominally trust. Never had a nation less cause to fear! That mind which in its unswerving homage to the laws which govern men and Nature we have learned to revere as unique among Princes and conspicuous among men, recognised immediately the laws which governed its own individual and peculiar position, and trod at once firmly in them. From the first day of his marriage the young and royal Husband sought that one thing, most creditable to his judgment and honourable to his heart, through which alone all other things could be safely added to him. That one object to which every other ambition yielded, and for which even his remarkable powers were for a while kept from the public knowledge, was simply and solely the good and the happiness of our Queen. This was the secret of that discretion which not even the most lukewarm could deny to him-no negative virtue, the offspring of cold calculation unnatural in the young, but the fruit of an entireness of selfdevotion of which man is seldom found capable.

Happy for both that he was met by a kindred spirit! Every advantage that the nation has derived from the Prince's career is owing to the perfect harmony of the two individuals thus loftily placed. Had the Royal Lady who bestowed her hand been less royally noble in nature-had there been the slightest jealousy of his influence, or of his personal participation in scenes and duties denied to the Crown, it is not too much to say that the world would have known but little of the Prince's powers for

N 2

those

those great departments of public utility which he has made so peculiarly his own, and that he would have hidden them contentedly under the cloak of a learned retirement.

A touching passage in one of his speeches shows, with the interest which he felt at once even for our most quaint and bygone institutions, the principle on which he abstained, in small things as in great, from all that could compromise the young and generous Sovereign at his side. This speech was uttered at a dinner at the Merchant Taylors' Company, when, thanking them for his admission as a freeman, the Prince added, "I remember well with what regret, when, shortly after I came of age, the Companies of the Goldsmiths and Fishmongers offered me their freedom, I found myself compelled to decline this honour; being informed that, identified as they were by historical traditions with two opposite parties, and still representing these parties, I could make a choice only of one of them; and being fully sensible that, like the Sovereign to whom I had just been united, and to devote my whole existence to whom it had become my privilege, I could belong only to the nation at large-free from the trammels and above the dissensions of political parties.'

But if it was right and wise to forbear all exercise of personal influence, until convinced of its compatibility with that Dignity and that Pleasure which alone he studied, it was as difficult, most would have supposed, to know how to apply it within the limits of his position, when convinced that he might do so with propriety. And here the intellectual superiority of the mind at once asserts itself. As Raphael compelled the unfavouring spaces of the Farnesina to minister to the inspiration of some of his finest compositions, so it has ever been the test of true greatness to convert untoward conditions into occasions of the highest success. We find one chief clue to the Prince's unparalleled career in one of those pregnant sentences—we shall later quote it with its context-addressed to a large and cultivated assembly, which startled his hearers into the recognition of a new and remarkable individuality. 'Gentlemen, I conceive it to be the duty of every educated person closely to watch the time in which he lives, and, as far as in him lies, to add his humble mite of individual exertion for the accomplishment of what he conceives Providence to have ordained.' These are the words of a man, who, under the modest profession of studying his own time, was ever reaching forward to convictions far in advance of it; and who, while supposed to be denied the field of politics, quietly instructed the world in that truest science of the politician, which prevents evil by anticipating the coming need.

In a country where scarcely a day passes without examples of

the

the oratory of the most gifted and practised of her children, it was no small test of a Prince, foreign in birth and education, to enter the lists of public speaking, and measure himself against a standard no less peculiar to ourselves than high in mark. But here again the lofty tone of the mind, in all its parts, ensured his success. Casting aside all ambition of personal display, he sought simply and grandly to fathom the principles of whatever subject he had in hand, bringing to bear upon it a profoundness of thought and unstudied nobility of language, which, for all the national self-complacency, will ever remain the newest thing an English public can hear. And the truth was mighty and always prevailed, and the most eloquent of his hearers acknowledged that a new grace, beyond the reach of art, had been won in their own national accomplishment. The man who sees clearly, thinks correctly, reasons profoundly, and knows largely, has power over all subjects fitted for the human mind to investigate. Wonder therefore ceases as admiration and respect rise, as we view the varied topics over which this gifted individual showed equal

power.

These speeches have a further and incidental interest as the record of the characteristic Associations which have grown in this country during these last fastest and fullest years; marking nothing more strikingly than the decline of that sphere of party for which it was the Prince's gain, not loss, to be ineligible.

It may be observed that Prince Albert had, from an early period, been solicited to become the President of such philanthropic Societies as were supposed not to commit him on any political topics; a chary compliment which he turned in the end nobly against us.

The first occasion on which His Royal Highness took part in a public meeting was one which the 'Speeches' do not record. It was held on the 1st June, 1840, when, as President of the 'Society for the Extinction of the Slave Trade,' he took the chair at Exeter Hall. Here he spoke a few words upon the object of the meeting, which, there is no reason to doubt, were in every sense his own; showing, as they do, a simplicity and fitness which link them naturally with his maturer expressions. But his extreme youth (he was then not twenty-one) caused little importance to be attached to this appearance. He was thought a great catch for a benevolent party, but the very allusions made in his presence to the necessity for banishing politics for that day, the merit claimed for the intention, and the obvious difficulty of adhering to it, betrayed the total absence of that larger spirit which was mainly to be fostered by that then little known youthful President. A second occasion, also unnoticed in the collection of 'Speeches,'

occurred

occurred on the 11th May, 1842, when Prince Albert filled the chair at the Anniversary Dinner of the Literary Fund Society, supported by the Duke of Cleveland and the Marquis of Lansdowne. Here, in addition to the necessary forms of proposing the Queen's health, and the prosperity of the Institution, he addressed the assembly in a short speech, expressing sentiments of appreciation for those who pursue the grand career of the cultivation of the human mind,'—taken for words of form at the time, but since recognised as words of earnest truth. Here the Prince listened to the voices of Moore and Campbell, probably for the first and last time.

It is possible that one so intelligent felt that, in presiding over such dinners for charitable purposes, he was only filling a place for which an Englishman of note would never be found wanting, and thus contributing no additional advantage to his adopted country; for this was the first and last time that we find him, as we now feel it, so inappropriately employed. Nor are we aware that he appeared on any public occasion requiring an address, until May 18, 1848, when he presided at a Meeting of the Society for Improving the Condition of the Labouring Classes.' The object of this Society is to build model houses for the dwellings of the Poor, to establish the field-garden and allotment system, and loan societies on sound principles. Here the lapse of time, which had converted him from a youth into a man, is perceived at once. His speech is a canon of true principles on that subject,—namely, how best to assist our poorer fellow creatures,-which history proves to have been the most puzzling in this world; while the pure philosophy on which he took his ground, emanated with startling force from royal lips:

'Depend upon it, the interests of classes too often contrasted are identical, and it is only ignorance which prevents their uniting for each other's advantage. To dispel that ignorance, to show how man can help man, notwithstanding the complicated state of civilized society, ought to be the aim of every philanthropic person; but it is more peculiarly the duty of those who, under the blessing of Divine Providence, enjoy station, wealth, and education.

'Let them be careful, however, to avoid any dictatorial interference with labour and employment, which frightens away capital, destroys that freedom of thought and independence of action which must remain to every one if he is to work out his own happiness, and impairs that confidence under which alone engagements for mutual benefit are possible.

'God has created man imperfect, and left him with many wants, as it were to stimulate each to individual exertion, and to make all feel that it is only by united exertions and combined action that these im

perfections