there, received the homage of the richly-robed Aldermen, and the
resplendent Sheriffs, and that effulgent Lord Mayor, she must have
fancied herself something more than a fairy Princess,--say, an Oriental
goddess being adored and sacrificed to by gorgeous Oriental Princes,
Sultans and Satraps, Pashas, Padishas, and the Grand-Panjandrum himself.

After the dinner, an imposing personage, called the Common Crier, strode
into the middle of the hall, and solemnly cried out: "The Right Honorable
the Lord Mayor gives the health of our Most Gracious Sovereign, Queen
Victoria!" This, of course, was drunk with all the honors, and extra
shouts that made the old hall ring. The Queen rose and bowed her thanks,
and then the Common Crier announced--Her Majesty's toast: "The Lord
Mayor, and prosperity to the City of London." The Queen, it is stated,
honored this toast in sherry one hundred and twenty years old--liquid
gold! Very gracious of her if she furnished the sherry. I hope, at all
events, she drank it with reverence. Why, when that old wine was bottled,
Her Majesty's grandfather lacked some twenty years of being born, and the
American Colonies were as loyal as London;--then the trunk of the royal
old Bourbon tree, whose last branch death lopped away but yesterday at
Frohsdorf, seemed solid enough, though rotten at the core; and, the great
French Revolution was undreamed of, except in the seething brain of some
wild political theorist, or in some poor peasant's nightmare of
starvation. When that old wine was bottled, Temple Bar, under the
garlanded arch of which Her Majesty had just passed so smilingly, was
often adorned with gory heads of traitors, and long after that old wine
was bottled, men and women could be seen of a Friday, dangling from the
front of Newgate prison, and swinging in the morning air, like so many
ghastly pendulums.

This year 1837, Victoria spent her first Christmas as a Queen at Windsor,