History, and of the leading truths and precepts of the Christian Religion as taught by the Church of England, as well as an acquaintance with the Chronology and principal facts of English History remarkable in so young a person.  To questions in Geography, the use of the Globes, Arithmetic, and Latin Grammar, the answers which the Princess returned were equally satisfactory.”  They did not believe that the Duchess’s plan of education was susceptible of any improvement; and the Archbishop of Canterbury, who was also consulted, came to the same gratifying conclusion.

One important step, however, remained to be taken.  So far, as the Duchess explained to the Bishops, the Princess had been kept in ignorance of the station that she was likely to fill.  “She is aware of its duties, and that a Sovereign should live for others; so that when Her innocent mind receives the impression of Her future fate, she receives it with a mind formed to be sensible of what is to be expected from Her, and it is to be hoped, she will be too well grounded in Her principles to be dazzled with the station she is to look to.”  In the following year it was decided that she should be enlightened on this point.  The well—­known scene followed:  the history lesson, the genealogical table of the Kings of England slipped beforehand by the governess into the book, the Princess’s surprise, her inquiries, her final realisation of the facts.  When the child at last understood, she was silent for a moment, and then she spoke:  “I will be good,” she said.  The words were something more than a conventional protestation, something more than the expression of a superimposed desire; they were, in their limitation and their intensity, their egotism and their humility, an instinctive summary of the dominating qualities of a life.  “I cried much on learning it,” her Majesty noted long afterwards.  No doubt, while the others were present, even her dear Lehzen, the little girl kept up her self-command; and then crept away somewhere to ease her heart of an inward, unfamiliar agitation, with a handkerchief, out of her mother’s sight.

But her mother’s sight was by no means an easy thing to escape.  Morning and evening, day and night, there was no relaxation of the maternal vigilance.  The child grew into the girl, the girl into the young woman; but still she slept in her mother’s bedroom; still she had no place allowed her where she might sit or work by herself.  An extraordinary watchfulness surrounded her every step:  up to the day of her accession, she never went downstairs without someone beside her holding her hand.  Plainness and regularity ruled the household.  The hours, the days, the years passed slowly and methodically by.  The dolls—­the innumerable dolls, each one so neatly dressed, each one with its name so punctiliously entered in the catalogue—­were laid aside, and a little music and a little dancing took their place.  Taglioni came, to give grace and dignity to the figure, and