the order of the Garter. On the 10th Mr. Chamberlain had a few minutes' audience with her, so that she might learn the immediate prospect of South African affairs. It was her last interview with a minister. The widowed duchess of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha arrived on a visit, and, accompanied by her, the queen drove out on the 15th for the last time. By that date her medical attendants recognised her condition to be hopeless. The brain was failing, and life was slowly ebbing. On the 19th it was publicly announced that she was suffering from physical prostration. The next two days her weakness grew, and the children who were in England were summoned to her deathbed. On 21 Jan. her grandson, the German emperor, arrived, and in his presence and in the presence of two The queen's death. sons and three daughters she passed away at half-past six in the evening of Tuesday, 22 Jan. She was eighty-one years old and eight months, less two days. Her reign had lasted sixty-three years, seven months, and two days. She had lived three days longer than George III, the longest-lived sovereign of England before her. Her reign exceeded his, the longest yet known to English history, by nearly four years. On the day following her death her eldest son met the privy council at St. James's Palace, took the oaths as her successor to the throne, and was on the 24th proclaimed king under the style of Edward VII.
In accordance with a dominant sentiment of her life the queen was accorded a military Her funeral. funeral. On 1 Feb. the yacht Alberta, passing between long lines of warships which fired a last salute, carried the coffin from Cowes to Gosport. Early next day the remains were brought to London, and were borne on a gun carriage from Victoria station to Paddington. In the military procession which accompanied the cortege, every branch of the army was represented, while immediately behind the coffin rode King Edward VII, supported on one side by his brother, the Duke of Connaught, and on the other by his nephew, the German emperor. They were followed by the kings of Portugal and of Greece, most of the queen's grandsons, and members of every royal family in Europe. The funeral service took place in the afternoon, with imposing solemnity, in St. George's Chapel, Windsor. On Monday, 4 Feb., the coffin was removed privately, in the presence only of the royal family, to the Frogmore mausoleum, and was there placed in the sarcophagus which already held the remains of Prince Albert.
No British sovereign was more sincerely mourned. As the news of the queen's death The universal sorrow. spread, impassioned expressions of versai grief came from every part of the United Kingdom, of the British empire, and of the world. Native chieftains in India, in Africa, in New Zealand, vied with their British-born fellow-subjects in the avowals of a personal sense of loss. The demonstration of her people's sorrow testified to the spirit of loyalty to her person and position which had been evoked by her length of life and reign, her personal sorrows, and her recent manifestations of sympathy with her subjects' welfare. But the strength and popularity which the grief at the queen's death proved the monarchy to enjoy were only in part due to her personal character and the conditions of her personal career. A force of circumstances which was not subject to any individual control largely contributed to the intense respect and affection on the part of the people of the empire which encircled her crown when her rule ended. The passion of loyalty with which she The queen and imperial unity. inspired her people during her last years was a comparatively late growth. In the middle period of her reign the popular interest, which her youth, innocence, and simplicity of domestic life had excited at the beginning, was exhausted, and the long seclusion which she maintained after her husband's death developed in its stead a coldness between her people and herself which bred much disrespectful criticism. Neither her partial resumption of her public life nor her venerable age fully accounts for the new sentiment of affectionate enthusiasm which greeted her declining days. It was largely the outcome of the new conception of the British monarchy which sprang from the development of the colonies and dependencies of Great Britain, and the sudden strengthening of the sense of unity between them and the mother country. The crown after 1880 became the living symbol of imperial unity, and every year events deepened the impression that the queen in her own person typified the common interest and the common sympathy which spread a feeling of brotherhood through the continents that formed the British empire. She and her ministers in her last years encouraged the identification of the British sovereignty with the unifying spirit of imperialism, and she thoroughly reciprocated the warmth of feeling for herself and her office which that spirit engendered in her people at home and abroad. But it is doubtful if, in the absence of the imperial idea for the creation of which she
