year had closed.  The Prince Consort’s health, though generally good, was not robust, and signs had not been wanting that his incessant toils were beginning to tell upon him.  There had been illnesses, transitory indeed, but too significant of “overwork of brain and body.”  In addition to personal griefs, such as the death of the Duchess of Kent and of a beloved young Coburg prince and kinsman, the King of Portugal, which had been severely felt, there were the unhappy complications arising out of “the affair of the Trent,” which the Prince’s statesmanlike wisdom had helped to bring to a peaceful and honourable conclusion.  That wisdom, unhappily, was no longer at the service of England when a series of negligences and ignorances on the part of England’s statesmen had landed us in the Alabama difficulty.

All these agitations had told upon a frame which was rather harmoniously and finely than vigorously constituted.  “If I had an illness,” he had been known to say, “I am sure I should not struggle for life.  I have no tenacity of life.”  And in the November of 1861 an illness came against which he was not able to struggle, but which took all the country by surprise when, on December 14th, it terminated in death.  Very many had hardly been aware that there was danger until the midnight tolling of the great bell of St. Paul’s startled men with an instant foreboding of disaster. What disaster it was that was thus knelled forth they knew not, and could hardly believe the tidings when given in articulate words.

At first it had been said, the Prince had a feverish cold; presently the bulletin announced “fever, unattended with unfavourable symptoms.”  It was gastric fever, and before long there were unfavourable symptoms—­pallid changes in the aspect, hurried breathing, wandering senses—­all noted with heart-breaking anxiety by the loving nurses, the Queen and Princess Alice—­the daughter so tender and beloved, the “dear little wife,” the “good little wife,” whose ministerings were so comfortable to the sufferer overwearied with the great burden of life.  He was released from it at ten minutes to eleven on the night of Saturday, December 14th; and there fell on her to whom his last conscious look had been turned, his last caress given, a burden of woe almost unspeakable, and for which the heart of the nation throbbed with well-nigh unbearable sympathy.  Seldom has the personal grief of a sovereign been so keenly shared by subjects.  Indeed, they had cause to lament; the removal of the Prince Consort, just when his faculties seemed ripest and his influence most assured, left a blank in the councils of the nation which has never been filled up.  “We have buried our king” said Mr. Disraeli, regretting profoundly this national loss; but for once the English people forgot the public deprivation in compassionating her who was left more conspicuously lonely, more heavily burdened, than even the poor bereaved colliers’ wives in the North