horrified and indignant” she was at Greville’s “indiscretion, indelicacy, ingratitude towards friends, betrayal of confidence and shameful disloyalty towards his Sovereign.”  She wrote to Disraeli to tell him that in her opinion it was “Very important that the book should be severely censured and discredited.”  “The tone in which he speaks of royalty,” she added, “is unlike anything one sees in history even, and is most reprehensible.”  Her anger was directed with almost equal vehemence against Mr. Reeve for his having published “such an abominable book,” and she charged Sir Arthur Helps to convey to him her deep displeasure.  Mr. Reeve, however, was impenitent.  When Sir Arthur told him that, in the Queen’s opinion, “the book degraded royalty,” he replied:  “Not at all; it elevates it by the contrast it offers between the present and the defunct state of affairs.”  But this adroit defence failed to make any impression upon Victoria; and Mr. Reeve, when he retired from the public service, did not receive the knighthood which custom entitled him to expect.  Perhaps if the Queen had known how many caustic comments upon herself Mr. Reeve had quietly suppressed in the published Memoirs, she would have been almost grateful to him; but, in that case, what would she have said of Greville?  Imagination boggles at the thought.  As for more modern essays upon the same topic, Her Majesty, it is to be feared, would have characterised them as “not discreet.”

But as a rule the leisure hours of that active life were occupied with recreations of a less intangible quality than the study of literature or the appreciation of art.  Victoria was a woman not only of vast property but of innumerable possessions.  She had inherited an immense quantity of furniture, of ornaments, of china, of plate, of valuable objects of every kind; her purchases, throughout a long life, made a formidable addition to these stores; and there flowed in upon her, besides, from every quarter of the globe, a constant stream of gifts.  Over this enormous mass she exercised an unceasing and minute supervision, and the arrangement and the contemplation of it, in all its details, filled her with an intimate satisfaction.  The collecting instinct has its roots in the very depths of human nature; and, in the case of Victoria, it seemed to owe its force to two of her dominating impulses—­the intense sense, which had always been hers, of her own personality, and the craving which, growing with the years, had become in her old age almost an obsession, for fixity, for solidity, for the setting up of palpable barriers against the outrages of change and time.  When she considered the multitudinous objects which belonged to her, or, better still, when, choosing out some section of them as the fancy took her, she actually savoured the vivid richness of their individual qualities, she saw herself deliciously reflected from a million facets, felt herself magnified miraculously over a