receives deputations and listens to addresses; it holds courts and
levees; it reviews regiments and fleets, and assists at charity
entertainments and at plays and shows of divers sorts; it plays races;
it is in constant demand for occasions requiring exalted presences for
their prosperity. These events seem public, and if they were imaginable
of a democracy like ours they would be so; but in the close-linked order
of English things they are social, they are domestic, they are from one
family to every other family directly or indirectly; the king is for
these ends not more a royalty than the rest of his family, and for the
most part he acts as a family man; his purely official acts are few.
Things that in a republic are entirely personal, as marriages, births,
christenings, deaths, and burials, whether of high or low, in a monarchy
are, if they affect royalty, of public and national concern, and it
would not be easy to show how one royal act differed from another in
greater or less publicity.

If you were of a very bold conjecture, or of a willingness to generalize
from wholly insufficient grounds, and take the chances of hitting or
missing, you might affirm a domestic simplicity of feeling in some
phases of functions exalted far beyond the range of republican
experiences or means of comparison. In the polite intelligence which we
sometimes have cabled to our press at home, by more than usually ardent
enterprise, one may have read that the king held a levee at St. James's;
and one conceived of it as something dramatic, something historic,
something, on the grand scale, civic. But if one happened to be walking
in Pall Mall on the morning of that levee, one saw merely a sort of
irregular coming and going in almost every kind of vehicle, or, as
regarded the spiritual and temporal armies, sometimes on foot. A thin
fringe of rather incurious but not unfriendly bystanders lined the
curbstone, and looked at the people arriving in the carriages,