Gustavus is fifty years old, tall, rather dark, quite unassuming, and is essentially democratic, while seeming the opposite, whereas Oscar was aristocratic, although he made much of the people.  Like all other Swedish kings, Gustavus adopted a motto when he ascended the throne; it is “With the People for the Fatherland”—­not inappropriate in view of his inheritance of a problem clamoring for solution, the extension of the suffrage and a more direct representation of the people in both the upper and lower houses of the Riksdag.  The new king, who possesses an uncommon amount of energy, may probably be depended upon to accomplish this reform.

There is neither pride of an objectionable type, nor any tendency to tyranny, nor one strain of arrogance in the new king.  He may not be able to draw upon such ripe culture or upon such fine talents as the monarch who preceded him, yet the Swedes have no fear that his love of truth and justice will not outweigh this deficiency and probably make him a more practical ruler.  As for the French descent of the Swedish royal house, neither the present nor the late king have ever been ashamed of their ancestry, or forgotten that the first Bernadotte on their throne was one of Napoleon’s greatest marshals.

Never will Gustavus V be able to give to words or actions that brilliantly original and kingly tone for which his late father was so admired everywhere.  That, to the mind of all beholders, is to be the drawback of his reign, for he is the merest mortal; where his father was the luminous angel.  Where Oscar would have been finely eloquent, Gustavus shows himself merely sensible.  Oscar’s temper was heated, his emotions were forever coming to the surface.  Gustave is, if more poised, less interesting.  He has always been addicted to manly sports and exercises.  He has often been observed to “put up” an excellent game of tennis at the club in Stockholm.  But he is without the alert and springy step of the old Oscar, whose muscles remained taut and elastic almost to his dying day.  Gustave lacks the literary aptitudes of his late father, likewise, who left a well-filled book of verse which admirers all over Europe did into French, German, Italian, Danish, and even Hungarian.  Gustave has not inherited his mother’s musical genius, either.  She was at one time a devotee of Wagner, a disciple of Kant, and always a pious evangelical of the German cast.  From both his parents Gustave received every encouragement to proficiency in music.  Music, to the late Oscar, was, both in theory and practice, an essential element in the intellectual life.  Gustave is less the artist than the practical king.