Into the jaws of war I came. No leagues
Like this with thee my Lausus made.

I beg of thee, if aught of grace be due
To conquered foes, suffer the earth to rest

Above my bones. I know that round me stand,
With rankling hatreds, all my countrymen ranged.
Oppose, I beg, this wrath, and me a tomb

Grant next my son.' Thus doth he speak, and sinks
Deep in his throat, before his eyes, the sword.

Flow o'er his armor forth the floods of gore,
And with them speeds his troubled life away."

M. GRANT DANIELL.

TWENTY YEARS IN THE LIFE OF A QUEEN.

A SUNDAY EVENING LECTURE.

I have been moved to speak to you this evening about a book you have all heard of, and some no doubt have read, touching the life of a woman who by her birthright has no equal in the Old World where rank still counts for worth, as I suspect it does in this New World also with a good many; for dukes and earls, as I make out, are only sour grapes to us when we cannot reach them.

It is a book from the hand and heart of this royal and noble lady, and, with another printed some years ago, contains such a record as can be found nowhere else, so far as I know, of a life which, by doom of heaven many say, and for good or evil, must be lived

"In that fierce light which beats upon a throne."

It is no hard matter, to be sure, to find out about all you want to know, or ought to know, about the majority of those royal and noble persons who have worn the crown of England, from Alfred, the good shepherd, as they fondly called him, to Victoria, who has sent us this book. Their public life in the earlier times, and their most private life in the later, is an open secret; but, as you read their story down to

this good queen's time, with a few noble exceptions, you do not wonder over Emerson's grand, ruthless lines,

"God said, I am tired of kings,

I suffer them no more,”—

and think of Paul's words as you trace the long succession, "Not many wise, not many mighty, not many noble are called," remember the wicked and witty earl's idea of an epitaph for one of them,

"Here lies our noble lord, the king,

Whose word no man relied on :
He never said a foolish thing,

And never did a wise one,"—

and of Wellington's stern estimate of another: "He was the first gentleman in Europe four hours in the day, and the greatest blackguard in England the other twenty."

There is a vast treasure of history and anecdote, state papers and chronicles, letters and journals, that throw light on these royal lives; but since Alfred was king there has been no record made by a royal hand which comes so near to the heart of a simple human worth as the record you will find in these books, sent over to us by the Queen Victoria. While, in the things her great fore-elder says about his own most noble life, you have to pause now and then, and read between the lines, before you can feel quite sure which is the king and which the man. Still, he reaches out his hand, this good king and shepherd of the English folk, across the round millennium, and touches this of the good queen; and I see no royal hands besides so worthy to meet and clasp. He is a man, as she is a woman, of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and both, I notice, nourish tender memories of the good mother who fended for them, and held them close to her heart, and their own hearts are one in their loyalty and love for Ethelswitha and Albert. And both alike centre in the home rather than the palace as the choicest spot on the earth; and they are one in their love for the children born of pure wedlock, and have never a thought even, to hide from the searching splendor of the great white throne.

You will gather from this, again, that I do not agree for one moment with those who seem to be of the majority on both sides the water, and treat this record of twenty years with a certain disdain. You are exactly right in your conclusion. I have gone through the book with a deep and moving interest, and find it wholesome as brown bread and milk, and right out of the heart of a simple human goodness, and have wondered especially how we could miss its meaning, who would find the woman in it rather than the queen.

I remember so well a summer's day, when I was walking over a moor and had sat down to rest, when a woman came along and said: "Have you heard the news? The king is dead; and now it is to be a queen, the Queen Victoria. They say she is only a girl, poor thing; but she is Queen of England now, and need never look behind her any more." She went her way over the heather; and it all comes back to me, as I read this book, how I sat on the crag, thinking over what it must be to be a queen. It seemed as if she could not be of quite the same human family as I was, and could know no trouble or hunger or thirst such as I was feeling that moment. And, indeed, as the woman had said, she would never look behind her any more; for to be Queen of England must be the end of all desire, and the happy eminence from which you look right into heaven. I think of that dream of the boy, rising fourteen, as I read this later record, and find it hard to stay my tears. Her sorrow, I say, has been greater than mine, as she tells me her story; and it is not the story of the Queen of Great Britain so much as the story of a woman who was left a widow, with many children to fend for and train up, please God, to be good men and women, and goes mourning through these twenty years after the lover of her youth, the father of these children, who has been taken while she is left, and finds it hard to believe, as so many good women do besides, that "we must never call them fatherless who have God and their mother"; a woman who cannot forget the brave, bright days when her life was so

full of blessing,-not because she was a queen, but a good man's wife, and a man, who, when things went against them, used to say, Let us make the best of them, the man she had chosen out of all the world to be her housebond, and, when her choice was made, never had a second thought, but wrought her love into the Idylls of a queen fairer than any her Laureate has sung; who, in these twenty years, can see no spot on which they once stood together, looking at the mountains or the sea, which does not bring back something of the awful and enduring sorrow, and yet, as you read on, lets you into the secret of the sweet leniency of time to heal us all, and the consolations of God, which come through the faith that she will find him again she has lost.

But I do not wonder they should not admire this record of twenty years in the life of a queen, who cannot think of this good woman as a purely human person, such as we are or should be to each other, but more or other than human, shall I say, because of the divinity that doth hedge one in her great place, and not to be thought of at all as we think of the good women and wives and mothers in this New World.

It must be a surprise to them to read this book in which the woman is so much more than the queen; but the wonder to me is that we should not catch this secret on the wing. Her grandfather stormed and wept bitter tears, they say, when he had to allow the paper to pass your fathers drew up, and made good in so many battles, that our simple manhood and womanhood is more than that of kings and queens, when we are true to its grand and holy meanings. His grand-daughter, who accepts the truth Burns has made radiant in the poem she loves best of all he has written, "A man's a man for a' that," makes this truth radiant again in her record; and then some of us are ready to fall in with the conclusion of the critics, who have no part or lot in our life, that the record is not worthy her Majesty. I care nothing, in such a case, for trans-Atlantic opinion, and take no part or lot in any surmise or sneer. The book

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is honest as the day to me, and pure as the records made by the angels. Here is a gentle and loving heart beating under the purple,— a woman who is more than the queen, and who is not to win our reverence and will not win it, because she wears the crown of the choicest monarchy on the earth, but because she is own sister to all good women, and faithful unto death to their diviner crown and sceptre.

There is another reason why the children of my great old mother England should not take very kindly to this record or make much ado about it. Scotland has stolen the woman's heart away from England, and made the Tay more to her than the Thames. If I have caught her secret, she feels that in Scotland, or let us say the Highlands, you can live a simpler and more human life than you would dare to live on the south side of the border, and let your heart beat more freely toward your kind, no matter what may be your grade and condition.

A friend of mine told me how he talked with a man, some years ago, who was an English gentleman by birth and a graduate of Oxford, but was then driving a stage on the far frontier; and, asking him how it was that he should have thrown up his splendid chances, he said: "Because, when I grew up to be a man, I found I must defer too much to the man who was above me in mere rank, and was learning to look down upon the man who was below me, so I preferred to find some place where I could meet men on more equal terms, and measure them by their manhood." It was the same feeling, I suppose, which made the heir to one of the first dukedoms in England, a few years ago, take another name, hide away his dignity, and ship before the mast as a common sailor. He wanted to measure himself by the standard of a simple manhood pared down to its lowest terms. Now, your Scotchman is by no means any better than he should be; but I do think he holds his own against mere rank a little better than your Englishman, or, shall I say, nourishes that grand line more thoroughly in the poem her Majesty loves best from the heart of the peerless peasant singer, and so she finds something there she