TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE QUEEN.
THERE is something very touching and motherlike in the frankness with which the Queen, through the Court Circular, asks her people to sympathise in the grief she feels for the loss of a devoted attendant. The grief is perfectly natural, for service like John Brown's, the service of a servant who makes life easier at every turn, yet is as trustworthy as a gentleman, is what every one seeks, and few ever find. The Queen has relied for years upon her husband's favourite at- tendant, not only for the usual services of a chasseur, but for a personal guardianship against the lunatics whom even she, as her history shows, has constantly to dread. The Queen is in no danger from her British subjects, and is, we believe, more protected than any Minister against Fenians by the Irish certainty that America would never forgive any at- tempt on her life ; but the danger from lunatics is irremoveable and real, and the constant guardianship of a powerful and devoted attendant is essential to her Majesty's freedom to ride, and walk, and enjoy the chilly air she loves. A man so trusted must become a humble friend, and we honour the Sovereign for expressing so publicly that " friendship " was the feeling she entertained for one so humbly faithful for so many years.
We wonder how many of her subjects ever reflect on the pathetic element in the Queen's present position, the contrast between her place in the world, as the only woman alive now reigning over a great people by legitimate right—the only other great reigning lady, the Empress of China, is only Regent for her son—popular or even beloved by millions, half-worshipped, as a well-informed correspondent tells us to-day, in India, a separate figure known to the whole human race, yet burdened with a solitariness only to be felt by Kings. Sovereigns are always more solitary than others of mankind, for, except with husband or wife, a Sovereign can have no perfect intimacies ; and if their lives are long pro- longed, their friendships must grow few. The " friends " of every young Sovereign are always persons older than himself— a fact markedly true of the Queen, to whom Lord Melbourne, the Duke of Wellington ,Lord Lansdowne, all men of an earlier genera- tion, stood first in that relation—and as they drop off, they are irreplaceable. The Queen has survived not only her husband, but almost all relatives of her own time, all her earlier politi- cal friends, and an entire group of closely-attached dependants, like Sir C. Phipps, Sir Arthur Helps, and many another less known to the general world. There is no one living who could address her by her Christian name, or, indeed, on any terms of equality ; while all her children but one are married, scattered, immersed in business and households of their own. It is a lonely peak to sit on, at the top of the world, and as age draws on the Sovereign, who already has reigned so long that men passing middle age have consciously known no other, must feel this more and more painfully, with a sadness which the movement of the world does not diminish. The Queen has had no misfortunes such as have afflicted many of her predecessors, no loss of subjects like George III., no loss of public honour like George IV., but she has to bear the burden of an ever-increasing pressure of interests, incidents, movements of mankind, of all which she must to herself seem the centre. Nothing eventful can happen in the world which is not in some way or other borne in pressingly on the Queen. The special feature of the age, the new complexity of life arising from rapid communication, began shortly before her accession—Huskisson was killed in 1830—and from that moment to this, affairs must have seemed to press in ever-increasing volume upon her, as if the very atmosphere had grown more weighty. Imagine what the telegraph alone has been to the Queen. To feel imperative duties increasing, and strength decaying, and life growing more and more lonely, is a sad position for any one ; but what must it be to a Sovereign who receives every day evidence that she is one of the central figures of the world, who hears on Monday that all America is glad because the report of an accident to her had proved exaggerated, on Tues- day that an Indian tribe has accepted her as goddess, on Wednesday that her daughter, one day to be Empress of Germany, has celebrated her Silver Wedding with Princes for train-bearers, on Thursday that a plot has been discovered which renders doubled watchfulness necessary round Windsor It is a strange position, one not to be desired ; and, remember, it must be judged not from
the Constitutional point of view, that the Queen only accepts. advice, but from her own point of view that the Queen, after taking advice, gives her own commands. No Monarch ever yet quite lost the feeling that in some indescribable way he was himself in some special degree responsible for the welfare of his people, and in that responsibility alone, be it as unreal as it may—and Englishmen often underrate the Queen's direct influence on affairs—is a burden which to a lonely woman, long experience can only make the heavier. Experience teaches us what to do, but teaches also how useless the doing often is. We are no devotees of Monarchy, gravely holding self-government to be more educative and more dignified ; but there has neven been in history a reign like that of Queen Victoria, who, sur- rounded by an impenetrable etiquette, breaks it to tell her people that devotion, even in the humblest of followers, has roused in her "real friendship." Republicanism in England sleeps, and will sleep while the Queen reigns. Is there not in that mere truism a sufficient biography ?
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