That Queen Victoria's marriage wag for her the one great event in her reign is the main contention in Mr, Lytton. Strachey's "Queen Victoria," a keen, vivid biography written without prejudice and also without undue regard for conventional views of people in high places. As, for example, when the author describes the Queen's father, the Duke of Kent, as a brainless martinet with appalling manners, and Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg Gotha as "undoubtedly a young prig."
"Wherever he went ho was eager to increase his knowledge, and, at a ball in Floreace, he was observed paying no attention' whatever to the ladies, and deep in conversation with the Jearned Signor Capponi. "Voila un prince dont. nous tourane tre tiers." said the Grand Duke of Tuscany, who was standing by; "Za belle danseuse Uattend, lo savant Voccupe."
His ambition was to do good, and Mr. Strachey insists that he married' in order to enlarge his opportunities of doing so and not for Jove of the Queen, who adored him. It was not long, we are told, before she submitted entirely to her husband and became little more than the instrument for his masterful will. For her, marriage was something of a rapture; for the Prince, an opportunity for duty. Had Prince Albert lived, Mr. Strachey suggests that the history of England would have been very different "It is easy to imagine how, under such a ruler, an attempt might have been made to convert Englind into a State as exactly organized, as elaborate. ly trained, as ficiently equipped, and as autocratically controlled es Pruseia herself. Then perhaps, event. ually, under some powerful leader—Gladstone or a Bright—the democr: forces in the country might have rallied together, and a struggle might have followed in which the Monarchy would have boom shaken to its foundations.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.