Who should now educate the Prince of Wales was the momentous question which had already been discussed in a pamphlet and after much anxious communing with themselves, and taking counsel of many others, including the sagacious Baron Stockmar, the Royal parents decided to act on the advice of the latter, who urged that the Prince's education should be "truly moral and traly English," while in sympathy with the spirit and changes of the time. The Prince," wrote Stockmar, ""should early be taught that thrones and social order have a stable foundation in the moral and intellectual faculties of man that by addressing his public exertions to the cultivation of these powers in his people, and by taking their dictates as the constant guides of his own conduct, he will promote the solidity of his empire, and the prosperity of his subjects." In one word, it was decided to give the future monarch of England such a mental and moral training as should make him a model of a constitutional sovereign, trae to the Christian religion yet in sympathy with all the various social, scientific, and political movements of his time.
The responsibility of forming such a characteris "Bertie" first fell on Mr. Henry Birch, an assistant master at Eton, who had been captain of that school and had taken high honours at Cambridge; and when, four years later, Mr. Birch gave place to Mr. Gibbs, Lady Canning wrote from Windsor "Tt has been a terrible sorrow to the Prince of Wales, who had done no end of touching things since he heard, three weeks ago, that he was to lose him. He is such an affectionate dear little hoy his notes and presents, which Mr. Birch used to find on his pillow, were really too moving." In fact all the known incidents of the Prince's infancy and boyhood pointed to his possession of a thoroughly gond, and affectionate heart. Neither fr. Birch, his first tutor, nor from Mr. Gibbs, his second (who remained with him till 1858, when the Prince was in his seventeenth year), have we any testimony as to the manner in which he comported himself in his studies; but at any rate we have it on the authority of his father that, at his examination by the Archbishop: Canterbury, lasting an hour, prior to his confirmation, Bertie acquitted himself extremely well." The Prince," wrote his mother, had a very strong feeling about the solemnity of this act."
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.