up any topic so as to carry on a continual discourse. _She apologised
for not speaking English well enough to talk it_; intimated a hope that
she might talk it better and longer with me at some future time. She spoke
of her situation, and her manner was quite delightful."

The sentence in italics opens our eyes to one of the difficulties of the
Duchess to which we might not otherwise have given much consideration. We
are apt to take it for granted that, though there is no royal road to
mathematics, the power of speaking foreign languages comes to royal
personages, if not by nature, at least by inheritance and by force of
circumstances. There is some truth in this when there is a foreign father
or mother; when royal babies are brought up, like Queen Victoria, to speak
several languages from infancy, and when constant contact with foreigners
confirms and maintains the useful faculty. Even when a prince or a
princess is destined from his or her early youth to share a foreign
throne, and is brought up with that end, a provision may be made for an
adopted tongue to become second nature. But the Duchess of Kent was not
brought up with any such prospect, and during her eleven years of married
life in Germany she must have had comparatively little occasion to
practise what English she knew; while, at the date of her coming to
England, she was beyond the age when one learns a new language with
facility. Any one of us who has experienced the fettered, perturbed,
bewildered condition which results from being reduced to express ourselves
at an important crisis in our history through a medium of speech with
which we are but imperfectly acquainted, will know how to estimate this
unthought-of obstacle in the Duchess of Kent's path, at the beginning of
her widowhood.

This was the year (1820) of the greatest eclipse of the sun which had been
seen for more than a century, when Venus and Mars were both visible, with