brightest example of princely worth given to the age that is drawing to a
close. Regarded with admiration throughout all time as a beneficent queen
and splendid empress, she will also be honoured reverentially by the
coming centuries as a supremely good and noble woman.'

Nor did the Queen lack for friends upon another level. The old Duke of
Wellington, the Iron Duke, the victor of Waterloo, is said to have loved
her fondly. If any stranger had seen them together, 'he would have
imagined he beheld a fond father and an affectionate daughter laughingly
chatting.' She herself recorded her great regard for Dr Norman Macleod, as
we have noted, Lady Jane Churchill, and several others. But the devotion
which she and the Prince-Consort ever showed to the Baron Stockmar rises
to the height of ideal friendship. Stockmar had been the private physician
of Leopold, King of the Belgians, in his earlier days, and in the course
of events became the trusted adviser of the young Prince Albert. To him
the Queen and the prince wrote as only dutiful children might write to the
most affectionate and wisest of parents. They sought his advice and
followed it. They reared their children to do him honour. What this friend
was, may be gathered from what shrewd people thought of him. Lord
Palmerston, no partial critic, declared, 'I have come in my life across
only one absolutely disinterested man, and that is--Stockmar.' Subtle
aphorisms on the conduct of life may be culled, almost at random, from his
letters to the royal pair. We can take but one, which, read in conjunction
with the lives he influenced, is deeply significant:

'Were I now to be asked,' he wrote as he drew near his seventieth year,
'by any young man just entering into life, "What is the chief good for
which it behoves a man to strive?" my only answer would be "Love and
Friendship." Were he to ask me, "What is a man's most priceless
possession?" I must answer, "The consciousness of having loved and sought