dinners, the toasts of the Queen, and the Queen-dowager were received.

As a matter of course, Lord Melbourne became the Queen's instructor in the
duties of her position, and as she had no private secretary, he had to be
in constant attendance upon her--to see her, not only daily, but sometimes
three or four times a day. The Queen has given her testimony to the
unwearied kindness and pleasantness, the disinterested regard for her
welfare, even the generous fairness to political opponents, with which her
Prime Minister discharged his task. It seems as if the great trust imposed
on him drew out all that was most manly and chivalrous in a character
which, along with much that was fine and attractive, that won to him all
who came in close contact with him, was not without the faults of the
typical aristocrat, correctly or incorrectly defined by the popular
imagination. Lord Melbourne, with his sense and spirit, honesty and
good-nature, could be haughtily, indifferent, lazily self-indulgent,
scornfully careless even to affectation, of the opinions of his social
inferiors, as when he appeared to amuse himself with "idly blowing a
feather or nursing a sofa-cushion while receiving an important and perhaps
highly sensitive deputation from this or that commercial interest." The
time has come when it is fully recognised that whatever might have been
Lord Melbourne's defects, he never brought them into his relations with the
Queen. To her he was the frank, sincere, devoted adviser of all that it was
wisest and best for her to do. "He does not appear to have been greedy of
power, or to have used any unfair means of getting or keeping it. The
character of the young Sovereign seems to have impressed him deeply. His
real or affected levity gave way to a genuine and lasting desire to make
her life as happy and her reign as successful as he could. The Queen always
felt the warmest affection and gratitude for him, and showed it long after
the public had given up the suspicion that she could be a puppet in the
hands of a Minister. "But men--especially Lord Melbourne's political