Queen Victoria eBook

by the welcome which met her everywhere, she warmed to her work.  She visited Edinburgh, where the ovation of Liverpool was repeated and surpassed.  In London, she opened in high state the Colonial and Indian Exhibition at South Kensington.  On this occasion the ceremonial was particularly magnificent; a blare of trumpets announced the approach of Her Majesty; the “Natiohal Anthem” followed; and the Queen, seated on a gorgeous throne of hammered gold, replied with her own lips to the address that was presented to her.  Then she rose, and, advancing upon the platform with regal port, acknowledged the acclamations of the great assembly by a succession of curtseys, of elaborate and commanding grace.

Next year was the fiftieth of her reign, and in June the splendid anniversary was celebrated in solemn pomp.  Victoria, surrounded by the highest dignitaries of her realm, escorted by a glittering galaxy of kings and princes, drove through the crowded enthusiasm of the capital to render thanks to God in Westminster Abbey.  In that triumphant hour the last remaining traces of past antipathies and past disagreements were altogether swept away.  The Queen was hailed at once as the mother of her people and as the embodied symbol of their imperial greatness; and she responded to the double sentiment with all the ardour of her spirit.  England and the people of England, she knew it, she felt it, were, in some wonderful and yet quite simple manner, hers.  Exultation, affection, gratitude, a profound sense of obligation, an unbounded pride—­such were her emotions; and, colouring and intensifying the rest, there was something else.  At last, after so long, happiness—­fragmentary, perhaps, and charged with gravity, but true and unmistakable none the less—­had returned to her.  The unaccustomed feeling filled and warmed her consciousness.  When, at Buckingham Palace again, the long ceremony over, she was asked how she was, “I am very tired, but very happy,” she said.

III

And so, after the toils and tempests of the day, a long evening followed—­mild, serene, and lighted with a golden glory.  For an unexampled atmosphere of success and adoration invested the last period of Victoria’s life.  Her triumph was the summary, the crown, of a greater triumph—­the culminating prosperity of a nation.  The solid splendour of the decade between Victoria’s two jubilees can hardly be paralleled in the annals of England.  The sage counsels of Lord Salisbury seemed to bring with them not only wealth and power, but security; and the country settled down, with calm assurance, to the enjoyment of an established grandeur.  And—­it was only natural—­Victoria settled down too.  For she was a part of the establishment—­an essential part as it seemed—­a fixture—­a magnificent, immovable sideboard in the huge saloon of state.  Without her the heaped-up banquet of 1890 would have lost its distinctive quality—­the comfortable order of the substantial unambiguous dishes, with their background of weighty glamour, half out of sight.