offer an asylum to him in a day of utter disaster and overthrow, and
where his life, chequered by vicissitudes stranger than any known to
romance, was to come to a quiet close. It has been the singular
fortune of Her Majesty to receive into the sacred shelter of her
realm two dethroned monarchs, two fallen fortunes, two dynasties cast
out from sovereign power, while her own throne, "broad-based upon her
people's will, and compassed by the inviolate sea," has stood firm
and unshaken, even by a breath. And it has been her special honour to
cherish with affection, even warmer in their adversity, the friends
who had gained her regard when their prosperity seemed as bright and
their great position as assured as her own. Visiting the Emperor
Napoleon in his splendid capital, feted and welcomed by him and his
Empress with every flattering form of honour that his ingenuity could
devise or his power enable him to show, she did not forget the
Orleans family and their calamities, but frankly urged on her host
the injustice of the confiscations with which he had requited the
supposed hostility of those princes, and endeavoured to persuade him
to milder measures. She visited in his company the tomb of the
lamented Duke of Orleans; and her first care on returning to England
was to show some kindly attention to the discrowned royalties who
were now her guests. In the same spirit, in after years, she extended
a friendly hand to the exiled Empress Eugenie, escaping from new
revolutionary perils to English safety, and altogether declined to
consider her personal regard for the lady, whose attractions had
deservedly gained it in brighter days, as being in any sense
complicated with matters political. The resolute loyalty with which
she at once maintained her private friendships and kept them entirely
apart from her public action compelled toleration from the persons
most inclined to take umbrage at it.

An instance of successful and courageous enterprise on Her Majesty's
part may well close this brief notice of the internal and external
convulsions which for a time shook, though they did not shatter, the
peace of our realm. In the late summer of 1849 a royal visit to
Ireland, now just reviving from its misery, was planned and carried
out with complete success; the wild Irish enthusiasm blazed up into
raptures of a loyal welcome, and the Sovereign, who played her part
with all the graceful perfection that her compassionate heart and
quick intelligence suggested, was delighted with the little tour,
from which those who shared in it prophesied "permanent good" for
Ireland. At least it had a healing, beneficial effect at the moment;
and perhaps more could not have been reasonably hoped. Later royal
visits to the sister isle have been less conspicuous, but all fairly
successful.



CHAPTER IV.

THE CRIMEAN WAR.

[Illustration: The Crystal Palace, 1851.]

The "Exhibition year," 1851, appears to our backward gaze almost like
a short day of splendid summer interposed between two stormy seasons;
but at the time men were more inclined to regard it as the first of a
long series of halcyon days. Indeed, the unexampled number and
success of the various efforts to redress injury and reform abuses,
which had signalised the new reign, might almost justify those
sanguine spirits, who now wrote and spoke as though wars and
oppression were well on their way to the limbo of ancient barbarisms,
and who looked to unfettered commerce as the peace-making civiliser,
under whose influence the golden age--in more senses than one might
revisit the earth.

[Illustration: Lord Ashley.]

We have already referred to certain of the new transforming forces
whose action tended to heighten such hopes; there are two reforms as
yet unnamed by us, distinguishing these early years, which are
particularly significant; though one at least was stoutly opposed by
a special class of reformers. We refer to the legislation dealing
with mines and factories and those employed therein, with which is
inseparably connected the venerable name of the late Lord
Shaftesbury; and to the abolition of duelling in the army, secured by
the untiring efforts of Prince Albert, who had enlisted on his side
the immense influence of the Duke of Wellington.

That peculiar modern survival of the ancient trial by combat, the
duel, was still blocking the way of English civilisation when Her
Majesty assumed the sceptre. A palpable anachronism, it yet seemed
impossible to make men act on their knowledge of its antiquated and
barbarous character; legislation was fruitless of good against a
practice consecrated by false sentiment and false ideas of honour;
but when dislodged from its chief stronghold, the army, it became
quickly discredited everywhere, with the happy result noted by a
contemporary historian, that _now_ "a duel in England would seem as
absurd and barbarous as an ordeal by touch or a witch-burning."
Militarism, that mischievous counterfeit of true soldierly spirit,
could not thrive where the duel was discountenanced; and the friends
of peace might rejoice with reason.

But those peaceful agitators, the sagacious, energetic Cobden and his
allies, resented rather sharply the interference of the Lord Ashley
of that day with the "natural laws" of the labour market--laws to
whose operation some of the party attributed the cruelly excessive
hours of work in factories, and the indiscriminate employment of all
kinds of labour, even that of the merest infants. Undeterred by
these objections, convinced that no law which sanctioned and promoted
cruelty did so with true authority, Lord Ashley persisted in the