this is only due to the personal credit of her Majesty, who insists
upon it that there shall be every magnificence required by her
station, but without incurring a single debt." In order to show how
the additional cost of such royal hospitality taxed the resources even
of the Queen of England, it may be well to give an idea of the
ordinary scale of housekeeping at Windsor Castle. Lady Bloomfield
likens the kitchen-fire to Nebuchadnezzar's burning fiery furnace.
Even when there was no company, from fifteen to twenty joints hung
roasting there. In one year the number of people fed at dinner in the
Castle amounted to a hundred and thirteen thousand!

Shall we be accused of small moralities and petty lessons in thrift if
we say that this passage in Sir Robert Peel's speech recalls the
stories of the child-Princess's training, in a wholesome horror of
debt, and the exercise of such little acts of self-denial as can alone
come in a child's way; that it brings to mind the Tunbridge anecdote
of the tiny purchaser on her donkey, bidden to look at her empty purse
when a little box in the bazaar caught her eye, and prohibited from
going further in obtaining the treasure, till the next quarter's
allowance was due? Well might the nation that had read the report of
Sir Robert Peel's speech listen complacently when it heard in the
following month, of the Queen's acquisition of a private property
which should be all her own and her husband's, to do with, as they
chose. Another country bestowed, upon quite different grounds, on one
of its sovereigns the honourable title of King Honest Man. Here was
Queen Honest Woman, who would not buy what she could not afford, or
ask her people to pay for fancies in which she indulged, regardless of
her means. A different example had been presented by poor Louis XVI.
and Marie Antoinette, who, after a course of what their most faithful
servants admitted to be grievous misrule and misappropriation of