he would almost certainly have subsided into a high-minded nonentity, an aimless dilettante busy over culture, a palace appendage without influence or power.  But he was not left to himself:  Stockmar saw to that.  For ever at his pupil’s elbow, the hidden Baron pushed him forward, with tireless pressure, along the path which had been trod by Leopold so many years ago.  But, this time, the goal at the end of it was something more than the mediocre royalty that Leopold had reached.  The prize which Stockmar, with all the energy of disinterested devotion, had determined should be Albert’s was a tremendous prize indeed.

The beginning of the undertaking proved to be the most arduous part of it.  Albert was easily dispirited:  what was the use of struggling to perform in a role which bored him and which, it was quite clear, nobody but the dear good Baron had any desire that he should take up?  It was simpler, and it saved a great deal of trouble, to let things slide.  But Stockmar would not have it.  Incessantly, he harped upon two strings—­Albert’s sense of duty and his personal pride.  Had the Prince forgotten the noble aims to which his life was to be devoted?  And was he going to allow himself, his wife, his family, his whole existence, to be governed by Baroness Lehzen?  The latter consideration was a potent one.  Albert had never been accustomed to giving way; and now, more than ever before, it would be humiliating to do so.  Not only was he constantly exasperated by the position of the Baroness in the royal household; there was another and a still more serious cause of complaint.  He was, he knew very well, his wife’s intellectual superior, and yet he found, to his intense annoyance, that there were parts of her mind over which he exercised no influence.  When, urged on by the Baron, he attempted to discuss politics with Victoria, she eluded the subject, drifted into generalities, and then began to talk of something else.  She was treating him as she had once treated their uncle Leopold.  When at last he protested, she replied that her conduct was merely the result of indolence; that when she was with him she could not bear to bother her head with anything so dull as politics.  The excuse was worse than the fault:  was he the wife and she the husband?  It almost seemed so.  But the Baron declared that the root of the mischief was Lehzen:  that it was she who encouraged the Queen to have secrets; who did worse—­undermined the natural ingenuousness of Victoria, and induced her to give, unconsciously no doubt, false reasons to explain away her conduct.

Minor disagreements made matters worse.  The royal couple differed in their tastes.  Albert, brought up in a regime of Spartan simplicity and early hours, found the great Court functions intolerably wearisome, and was invariably observed to be nodding on the sofa at half-past ten; while the Queen’s favourite form of enjoyment was to dance through the night, and then, going out into the portico of the Palace,