Another event which may be called domestic belongs to the year following this marriage—­the coming of age of the Prince of Wales, fixed, according to English use and wont, when the heir of the crown completes his eighteenth year.  Every educational advantage that wisdom or tenderness could suggest had been secured for the Prince.  We may note in passing that one of his instructors was the Rev. Charles Kingsley, whom Prince Albert had engaged to deliver a series of lectures on history to his son.  This honour, as well as that of his appointment as one of Her Majesty’s chaplains, was largely due to royal recognition of the practical Christianity, so contagious in its fervour, which distinguished Mr. Kingsley, not less than his great gifts; of his eagerness “to help in lifting the great masses of the people out of the slough of ignorance and all its attendant suffering and vice”—­an object peculiarly dear to the Queen and to the Prince, as had been consistently shown on every opportunity.

When the time came that the youth so carefully trained should be emancipated from parental control, it was announced to him by the Queen in a letter characterised by Mr. Greville or his informant as “one of the most admirable ever penned.  She tells him,” continues the diarist, “that he may have thought the rule they adopted for his education a severe one, but that his welfare was their only object; and well knowing to what seductions of flattery he would eventually be exposed, they wished to prepare and strengthen his mind against them; that he was now to consider himself his own master, and that they should never intrude any advice upon him, although always ready to give it him whenever he thought fit to seek it.  It was a very long letter, all in that tone; and it seems to have made a profound impression on the Prince....  The effect it produced is a proof of the wisdom that dictated its composition.”

We have chosen this as a true typical instance of the blended prudence and tenderness that have marked the relations between our Sovereign and her children.  Aware what a power for good or evil the characters of those children must have on the fortunes of very many others, she and her husband sedulously surrounded them with every happy and healthy influence, never forgetting the supreme need of due employment for their energies.  “Without a vocation,” said the Prince Consort, “man is incapable of complete development and real happiness”:  his sons have all had their vocation.

It was the same period, marked by these domestic passages of mingled joy and sorrow, that became memorable in another way, through the various troublous incidents which gave an extraordinary impetus to our national Volunteer movement, which were not remotely connected with the War of Italian Independence, and for a short time overthrew the popular Ministry of Lord Palmerston, who was replaced in office by Lord Derby.  The futile plot of Felice Orsini, an Italian exile and