Our future King has well earned the right to the innocent pastimes and pleasures alluded to in my previous article, for the Prince of Wales is also a Prince of Workers. His working rule has been a working role of the hardest kind. It is well-known that his brother-in-luv, the late Emperor Frederick, sickened and died of mere inanition, rusted and fell to pieces for the simple reason that he had nothing to do, nothing to keep his faculties feestt and provide his energies with a titting outlet. But certainly the same cumot be said of the Prince of Wales, who is one of the most: a in all the Kingdom. Doubtless, like the German Crown Prince, he had been kept aloof from the political councils of his royal mother and her Cabinet. He was not entrusted with those confidential services, as private adviser to, and practical ce-worker with, Her Majesty, which had_been fulfilled by the Prince Consort. But in most other respects, he had to step into the shoes of his deceased 4 father as the performer of public functions, the more so as his grief-stricken mother poetically withdrew into private life after the death of her deeply adored husband. As Mr. Gladstone once said in Patliament Circumstances have tended to throw upon the Prince of Wales an unusual amount. of public duty, and every call ims been honourably and devotedly met.'
The more enumeration of the functions at which the Prince has thus figured at this call of public duty would till volumes—reviews attended, exhibitions opened, foundation-stones laid, meetings presided over, journeys undertaken, statues unveiled, dinners eaten and speeches. made, buildings and public works inaugurated, factories inspected, receptions held, and a thousand and one other functions por-formed. But with all his public labour, the Prince, perhaps, ims been most con spicuous asia patron, organiser, and opener of exhibitions, which may be said to ha been the creation of his father. As a b of ton, at the side of his royal parents, he had witnessed the inauguration of the first "world's-fair" in Hyde Park, and his imagination was fired with the ambition of continuing the work which his father had begun. Soon after his marriage we find hin connected with minor enterprises of a similar kind—like the South London Industrial Exhibition which he opened in 1865, and later on with great shows at Leeds, Nottingham, Liverpool, and a cure of other towns.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.