This was just after its author had told her he had been readingMidsummer Night's Dream' and could not understand its title as the action takes place on May Day. 'As your Majesty has much poetic taste and reading you might, Madam, in the inspiring silence of the "Glassalt Shiel" muse over this, and explain the mystery.' Like most women (and men) she was not at all insusceptible to flattery. Once and once only her vanity takes a rather contemptible form: she drives in the Park in 1864 and every one said that the difference shown, when I appeared and when Bertie and Alix drive, was not to be described. Naturally for them no one stops, or runs, as they always did, and do doubly now, for me.' But that is a solitary piece of pettiness. One of the greatest proofs of her magnanimity is the affection she always felt for, and always won from, the fascinating and beautiful Princess of Wales of whose popularity she might so easily have been jealous. But goodness always attracts goodness and, different as the two women were, they were both sincerely and unaffectedly good. The Queen's faults were of a very innocent order. She was a little self-willed, as what woman would not be who had looked at a throne from her nursery-windows and possessed one before she was out of her teens? She could blind herself, as we have seen, to duties she did not like and persuade herself that her retreats to Balmoral caused no inconvenience, had nothing to do with self-indulgence, and were simply indispensable measures of health and prudence! But happy is the woman, or man, who has no worse sins than these to confess. And if she was a little easily managed or deceived by the flatteries of Granville and Disraeli, is that very surprising? We all like to be told that we do our work well. And it must have been very pleasant to be told by Granville (especially as it was partially true) that she had 'saved the country'; or to hear from him of 'your Majesty's remarkable tact and power of what the French call tour,' and of his finding Gladstone 'quite under the charm.' Disraeli's flattery, as we have seen, felt no obligation to keep so near the truth as Granville's. He will tell her that what he would really like is to be her Private Secretary: for the sake of that he would willingly relinquish his present

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exalted post. That is a great honour, but to soothe and assist your Majesty in your Majesty's many troubles and great and inevitable anxieties, and all the constant pressure on your Majesty's heart and brain would not only be an honour: it would be happiness and the greatest!' No wonder she found him agreeable and original' in his first Premiership and advanced him to something like intimacy after 1874. He 'prizes nothing more' than the privilege of seeing her she visits him at Hughenden and sends him primroses (so that the Primrose League is right after all) which he likes so much better for being wild: they seem an offering from the fauns and dryads of the woods of Osborne.' What his real feelings about her were it is hard to tell. Probably here as elsewhere he was artist and actor rather than liar: an embellisher of the truth, often till you could hardly recognise it, but not a conscious sayer of the thing that was not. He and his great rival were alike in only one thing, perhaps : neither of them had it in him to state a fact or a feeling as it was. Disraeli buried it in flowers: Gladstone refined it away in subtleties of distinction or twisted it out of recognisable shape by exaggerations of its unimportant and concealments of its important features. Neither of them could at any time or on any subject be quite simple. The telling of plain tales they left to Palmerston in his way or Hartington in his, or even to 'a Mr Smith of Westminster,' whom Disraeli brought into office in 1874; and whom the Queen describes as 'a rich and most respectable, clever man who always maintained that the working classes were not republican.' Disraeli knew his own limitations, and liked both the humour and the utility of being surrounded by such men as Smith and Cross. Of the two unsimplicities there is no doubt which the Queen liked best. It was much more amusing to listen to Disraeli's fantastic orientalisms than to Gladstone's political casuistries. But it is a mistake to suppose that she was always hostile to Gladstone. Perhaps Gladstone, whose reverence for the throne was the profoundest of all the social reverences which were such a marked feature in his temperament, really had a stronger feeling for her than Disraeli. So at least good judges have thought. Certainly she began by.

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liking him the better of the two, and their relations were only beginning to be really bad at the end of this book. Up to 1876 her language about him is not at all unfriendly; she acknowledges his kindness to her, and made him the offer, not only of Honours, but of a house which she had at her disposal. And no one ever gave him a sounder or really kinder piece of advice than she when, in 1874, she urged him when going out of office not to 'hamper himself by any declarations as to measures of policy'; and told him, on his saying he meant to retire from public life, that that was all very well but that for a person in his position to decide this beforehand was almost impossible. Sir Robert Peel had said the same, but if he had lived he could not have carried it out.' How much better she knew him than he knew himself, and how much closer she was to the facts of his position! After all that is her dominant intellectual quality: common sense and an instinct for realities. Both the extravagances of Mayfair and the extravagances of Moody and Sankey seemed to her a little mad.' She was of the old mens sana in corpore sano' school, which will not be superseded to-morrow or the day after; and she was well aware that the method of sensationalism and excitement reaps no permanent harvests in any field, whether of pleasure or of religion. Yet her common sense did not keep her from the possession of qualities which common sense alone could never have given her. More perhaps than any of the virtues, humility was the discovery of Christianity. The Horatian common sense, which silly people who have never approached its level affect to despise, is an admirable quality. But it cannot go beyond its own world. It may check conceit but it cannot create humility. Perhaps there is no Christian Church or sect which would find all its demands satisfied by the Queen's religious creed and outlook. Yet the primary business of Christianity is the creation of goodness. And the Queen was a very good woman, and one whose goodness had in it elements which could only have been learnt in a Christian school. The wonder is not that they were learnt, but that they were retained and made part of her life. Has any Sovereign, exposed so very long as she was to the subtle flatteries of a throne, remained so Vol. 246.-No. 488.

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unaffectedly and genuinely simple, kind, and humble as Queen Victoria? She was not humble for her office: it was not right that she should be. But how humble she is for herself, and how real her feeling was of the equality, transcending all inequalities, which united her with the humblest of her subjects! This book is a book of the Queen, not of the woman. But the woman cannot be wholly concealed, and nearly all we see of her illustrates once more the simplicity, truthfulness, and, above all, the goodness of heart which endeared her to many thousands of her subjects who cared very little, and knew almost nothing, about the political labours with which she filled her life. She was not, and was the last person to claim to be, a genius. But there is something partly akin to genius in the creation of anything. And Queen Victoria certainly began the creation of a kind of Monarchy which neither England, nor any other country, had ever known before.

JOHN BAILEY.

Art. 2.-WHAT AILS THE ENGINEERING INDUSTRY? THE march of events works wondrous changes in every industry, but it is very doubtful whether any other trade has suffered such a metamorphosis as has the engineering industry during the past three decades. From the heights of the most prosperous and important of all industries it has apparently fallen to such depths that it has ceased to be a lucrative occupation for lads about to start in the industrial world.

Thirty years ago the mechanic was regarded as, and indeed was, an aristocrat of labour. He considered himself superior to other workers; he seldom associated with plasterers, plumbers, bricklayers, or carpenters, and it was beneath his dignity to be seen in company with an unskilled worker. Parents in every stratum of society, labourers and landlords, bank clerks and builders, shopkeepers and insurance agents, were anxious to apprentice their sons to 'engineering,' proud of the fact that their child was in such a nice trade,' and safe in the knowledge-so they thought-that he was being launched into a remunerative career. To-day, were one to question any parent, especially a working engineer, as to what trade he proposed putting his son to, the reply would be emphatic. 'I'll see that he doesn't go into the engineering industry. I'd sooner make him a dustman, road-sweeper, insurance agent, or tallyman.' Thirty years ago it was no easy task to get a lad into 'engineering.' Most firms required a premium of 40l. to 50%., 1007. being necessary in some cases. Rarely indeed was any one able to enter the trade except as a bound apprentice. As the customary wages for apprentices were: first year 4s. per week, second year 5s., third year 6s., fourth year 8s., fifth year 108., sixth year 12s. 6d., and the last year 15s., it was no mean sacrifice for many parents to accept.

But they produced mechanics in those days. An apprentice was not, as is so frequently done to-day, placed on one particular job and kept there; he went through the various shops, fitting, turning, erecting, pattern-making, smithy, and drawing office, spending a reasonable time in each, with the result that at the end of his apprenticeship-if the lad was intelligent-he was