say a Providential circumstance, that a QUEEN, during the late eventful years, has been on the throne of the British empire. Had a king been there, still more one of unpopular manner or retired habits, when all the thrones of Europe were falling around us, the event might have been very different, and England, with all its glories, have been sunk in the bottomless pit of revolution. The feelings of loyalty to a Queen, especially if she is young and handsome, and unites the virtues to the graces of her sex, are very different from those which, under the most favourable circumstances, can be awakened in favour of a king. The natural gallantry of man, the feelings of chivalry, the respect due to the softer sex, are mingled in overwhelming proportions with the abstract passions of loyalty when a young and interesting woman, endowed with masculine energy, but adorned with feminine beauty, surrounded by the husband of her choice and the children of their love, is seen braving the risks and enduring the fatigues of a journey through lands recently convulsed by civil dissension, solely to win the love of her subjects, to heal the divisions of the great family of which she forms the head.

History affords numerous examples of the far greater power, in periods of intestine troubles, queens have than kings in winning the affections or calming the exasperation of their subjects. Despite all her errors, notwithstanding her faults, Queen Mary exercised a sway over a large part of her subjects which no man in similar circumstances could have done. Austria would have been crushed by the arms of France and Bavaria in 1744, but for the chivalrous loyalty which led the Hungarian nobles to exclaim in a transport of generous enthusiasm, "Moriamur pro Rege nostro, Maria Theresa!" "Fair Austria spreads her mournful charms,

The Queen, the beauty, sets the world in arms."

And it is doubtful if all the fervour of the Reformation could have enabled England to withstand the assault of the Catholic league, headed by Spain in the time of Philip II., if in defence of the nation had not been joined the chivalrous loyalty of a gallant nobility to their Queen, as well as the stern resolution of a Protestant people in behalf of their religion and their liberties.

But the passion of loyalty, as all other passions, requires aliment for its support. Like love, it can live on wonder

fully little hope, but it absolutely requires some. A look, a smile, a word from a sovereign, doubtless go a great way; but entire and long-continued absence will chill even the warmest affections. It is on this account that Royal Progresses have so important an influence in knitting together the bonds which unite a people to their sovereign. They have one inestimable effect-they make them known to each other. The one sees in person the enthusiastic affection with which the sovereign is regarded by the people, the latter the parental interest with which the people are regarded by their sovereign. Prejudices, perhaps nourished by faction or fostered by party, melt away before the simple light of truth. A few hours of mutual intercourse dispels the alienation which years of separation, and the continued efforts of guilty ambition during a generation, may have produced. The generous affections spring up unbidden, when the evidence of the senses dispels the load of falsehood by which they had been restrained. Mutual knowledge produces mutual interest; and the chances of success to subsequent efforts to bring about an estrangement are materially lessened, by the discovery of how wide had been the misapprehension which had formerly existed, and how deep the mutual affection which really dwelt in the recesses of the heart, and was now brought to light by the happy approximation of the sovereign and her people.

It was a noble spectacle to behold a young Queen, at a time when scarce a monarch in Europe was secure on his throne, setting out with her illustrious consort and family to make a royal progress through her dominions, and selecting for the first place of her visit the island which had so recently raised the standard of rebellion against her government, and for the next the city which had first in the empire responded to the cry of treason raised in Paris, on the overthrow of the throne of Louis Philippe. Nor has the result failed to correspond, even more happily than could have been hoped, to the gallant undertaking. If it be true, as is commonly reported, that our gracious sovereign said, "She went to Ireland to make friends, but to the Land of Cakes to find them," she must by this time have been convinced that the generous design has, in both islands, proved successful beyond what her most enthusiastic friends could have dared to hope. Who could have recognised, in the multi

tudes which thronged to witness her passage through Cork, Dublin, and Belfast, and the universal acclamations with which she was everywhere received by all classes of her subjects, the chief cities of an island torn by civil dissension, and which had only a year before broken out into actual rebellion against her government? Who could have recognised in the youthful sovereign visiting the public buildings of Dublin, like a private peeress, without any of the state of a sovereign, and chiefly interested with her royal consort in the institutions devoted to beneficence, the Head of a Government whom the Irish organ of rebellion, The Nation, had so long represented as callous to all the sufferings of the people? And during the magnificent spectacle of the royal progress through Glasgow, where five hundred thousand persons were assembled from that great city and the neighbouring counties to see their Queen-and she passed for three miles through stately structures, loaded with loyalty, under an almost continued archway of flags, amidst incessant and deafening cheers who could have believed he was in a city in which democratic revolt had actually broken out only eighteen months before, and the walls had all been placarded, on the day when London was menaced, with treasonable proclamations, calling on the people to rise in their thousands and tens of thousands against the throne? And how blessed the contrast to the condition of Scotland when her last Queen had been in that neighbourhood, and the same towers of Glasgow Cathedral looked down on Morton issuing from the then diminutive burgh, to assail, in the immediate vicinity at Langside, the royal army headed by Mary, and drive her to exile, captivity, and death.*

We are not foolish enough to expect impossibilities from the Queen's visit-how splendid and gratifying soever its circumstances may have been. We know well how many and deep-rooted are the social evils which in both islands afflict society, and we are not so simple as to imagine that

* It is a curious coincidence, that the first man whom her Majesty met with and addressed, when she landed in Glasgow, was the Earl of Morton, the representative of the ruthless baron whose arms then proved so fatal to her beautiful and unfortunate ancestress. The first lady she shook hands with was Lady Belhaven, wife of Lord Belhaven, the descendant of the celebrated peer of the same name, who so vehemently opposed the union of Scotland and England. And, a few weeks before her Majesty's arrival in Glasgow, a stone erected by the Roman legions on the Wall of Antoninus, in the neighbourhood of that city, had been excavated, which bore an inscription beginning with the words VICTRIX VICTORIA." It may still be seen in the court-yard of Glasgow College,

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they will be removed by the sight of the Sovereign, as the innocent peasants believe that all physical diseases will be cured by the royal touch. We are well aware that the impression of even the most splendid pageants is often only transitory, and that sad realities sometimes return with accumulated force after they are over, from the contrast they present to imaginative vision. Still a step, and that too a most important one, has been taken in the right direction. If great, and in some respects lasting good has been done -if evils remain, as remain they ever will, in the present complicated condition of society, and the contending interests which agitate its bosom-one evil, and that the greatest of all, is lessened, and that is an estrangement between the People and their Sovereign. Crimes may return; but the recurrence of the greatest of all, because it is the parent of all others-high treason-is for a time, to any extent at least, rendered impossible. The most sacred and important of all bonds, that which unites the sovereign and her subjects, has been materially strengthened. The most noble of all feelings, the disinterested affection of a people to their Queen, has been called into generous and heartstirring action. The "unbought loyalty of men, the cheap defence of nations," is not at an end. And if the effect of the Royal Visit were only that, in the greatest cities of her dominions, our gracious Sovereign, in an age unusually devoted to material influences, has succeeded, by the sweetness and grace of her manners, in causing the hearts of some hundred thousands of her subjects to throb with loyal devotion, and, for a time at least, supplanted the selfish by the generous emotions the effect is not lost to the cause of order and the moral elevation of her people.

THE END.

PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, EDINBURGH.