husband's death at a public ceremony. She "prayed for help." But, however painful, she felt it was right that she should make the effort, and it helped her to overcome her extreme reluctance to take her part once more in the pageantry and glitter of royalty. Little by little she took up this burden also, helped and encouraged by her children, and from 1866 has from time to time opened Parliament in person, and taken her part as Sovereign in the public functions devolving on her position. There was at one time an undercurrent of rather mean resentment that she did not, after her widowhood, enter into social gayety and lead fashionable life as of old. The loss of her direct personal influence from the social world has been a very real one. But there are limits to human strength and endurance; and those who grumbled because the Queen absented herself from the world of fashion, were probably thinking more of the number and brilliancy of Court functions, and of the supposed benefit to trade accruing therefrom, than of the value of a pure-hearted woman's influence at the head of society. Mr. John Bright in 1866 gave a trenchant rebuke from a public platform to one of these grumblers, who asserted at a meeting of working-men that the Queen was so absorbed in her own grief as to have lost all sympathy with her people. He said:—
"I am not accustomed to stand up in defence of those who are the possessors of crowns. But I could not sit here and hear that observation without a sensation of wonder and of pain. I think there has been, by many persons, a great injustice done to the Queen in reference to her desolate and widowed position. And I venture to say this, that a woman, be she queen of a great realm, or be she the wife of one of your laboring men, who can keep alive in her heart a great sorrow for the lost object of her life and affection, is not at all likely to be wanting in a great and generous sympathy with you."
The whole meeting responded to the simple, generous words, touching as they did the chord of universal human feeling.
