by Edward R. Russell
Originally published in Belgravia (John Maxwell) vol.5 #19 (May 1868).
"If I were a king!" Of how many air-built castles has this been the foundation! Dreams of philanthropy, of ambition, of unlimited rest, of voluptuous enjoyment, of literary distinction, have all entered the waking thoughts of men time immemorial by this horn-gate. There is no divorcing splendid authority in the popular apprehension from ease and free volition. All the wise demonstrations that despots lead lives of carking responsibility, and that constitutional monarchs must be pestered ever by the infinitely little, go for nothing. The instinctive conception of royal leisure, kingly power, monarchical choice of occupation, outlives reason and defies knowledge. We are all privately of the opinion expressed in the Antigone, that it is part of the envied greatness of kings to do and speak whatever they please. "A dish for a king;" "Now lie I like a king,"—on this wise are the proverbial equivalents for all luxurious fancies. "If I were a king!" or—to put it in the concrete, as old and young English people do every day, whether their topic of thought be Jamaica negroes, the Fenians, the East-London distress, or some such trifle as dress, bookbinding, a menu, or a dream of opera-management—"If I were the Queen!"
Amongst other things, the poor pen, badge as it is of the sufferance of all our tribe, becomes glorified by association with royalty. Lying much worn and pithless on the desk of the littérateur, tumbled carelessly amidst briefs or abstracts, stuck behind the mercantile ear, dangling in the ink-bottle of the tax-gatherer, or plying anywhere or at any rate of speed its doomed mercenary vocation, how sorry an implement it is! But place it near the sceptre, let it lie at the disposal of a royal hand, a halo immediately surrounds it. Its lightest characters, its most crabbed flourishes, its weariest drivel,—all will be matter for the ages. Nor is this a mere instinct of base adulation: it is rather an unconscious acknowledgment that to be glorious the pen must be free.
As a matter of fact, there is no such royal liberty. The hack's magnum-bonum is not so hampered by orders as the dainty quill which plumes the standish of a queen's boudoir. No conveyancer is more bound by precedent than a kingly writer is held in check by the convenances; no stylus of penny-a-liner is held so inexorably to apparent facts as is the pen of a sovereign. But the sweet old fiction, the magic of royal option, haunts the air of royal authorship. The world is constantly unjust to those who do what it is their business to do. Those who preach because they are professionally bound to go twice a week into a pulpit hardly get a hearing. Even Shakespeare would lose caste if it were borne in mind that he produced his plays as a matter of business, being the actor, author, manager of his time. The literary amateur of any social standing has, in fact, a fine time of it; and the man who lives by his pen makes no complaint, because the option of writing or not writing is a most valuable suppressed premiss in all estimates of the literary character. Occasionally indeed the more than professional power and success of a Jacob Omnium adds to the lustre as truly as it purifies the morale of journalism.
Unquestionably it is good for men who are obliged to write that many write without personal occasion. It keeps up the standing of the profession that innumerable amateurs covet literary work; it even maintains a high standard of thought, for while the trade of writing is indulged in for love, it can never become a mere trade. The idea that a man does not write unless he has something to express besides his need of bread and cheese, is well worth keeping up, though it may sometimes be only a politic fiction; and nothing sustains it more distinctly than the eagerness of high folks to exercise literary functions. Except in the cases of a few men who are as much professors of literature as of statesmanship, the work amateurs are proud to do would usually be done better, even where there is special knowledge, by more practised and practical pens; but the way of the world is to look with interest and favour on the writings of persons of quality and position, and the weakness is neither wholly mean in origin nor without its public advantages.
Macaulay, though he deemed the literary privileges of lords as obsolete as their right to kill the king's deer on their way to Parliament, or their old remedy of scandalum magnatum, yet acknowledged a kindly feeling towards noble authors. "Industry," said he, "and a taste for intellectual pleasures are peculiarly respectable in those who can afford to be idle and who have every temptation to be dissipated. It is impossible not to wish success to a man who, finding himself placed, without any merit on his part, above the mass of society, voluntarily descends from his eminence in search of distinctions which he may justly call his own."
What is thus said of peers is more strikingly true of sovereigns; and of both it is also true that literary ability may obtain for its lordly or royal possessor other than literary triumphs. "A literary man," said the present Premier of England, in that mirror of himself, the Biography of Lord George Bentinck,—"a literary man who is a man of action is a two-edged weapon; nor should it be forgotten that Caius Julius and Frederick the Great were both eminently literary characters, and yet were perhaps the two most distinguished men of action of ancient and modern times."
Such two-edged weapons are rare, however, and one edge is usually blunt or notched, or otherwise useless. Of the two cases quoted by Mr. Disraeli, only one is even favourable to his argument. To Cæesar's literary ability—which it is pardonable to say was of the best English kind—too much honour can hardly be paid. Not only is he, as Frederick Schlegel says, "the first in whom we find perfect evenness of expression," but "when he handled the pen, he was guided by the selfsame principles as when he wielded the sword, directing his attention uninterruptedly to one sole object, and to it. making all others subservient." Not only was he "in complete possession of the qualities next only to liveliness in historic writing, clearness and simplicity," but he used his literary force conjointly with his military prowess to advance his ambition, and proved as invincible in his writing-room as in the field.
Frederick the Great has never received as an author, except from flatterers, any such commendation. His most sympathetic and eulogistic biographer ridicules his muse and pours contempt upon his political polemics. The founder and formulator of Prussian greatness was in fact a very simple victim to the writing cacoëthes. His poesies are in oblivion, and his character as Philosophe of Sans-Souci lives only as an eccentricity in royal annals. It was his fortune to learn to write and think in French—"not a bad dialect," Carlyle declares, "but none of the best; very lean and shallow, if very clear and convenient;" and his poetry, except that it was inconvenient, may be dismissed in the terms which serve to describe his dialect.
Even the French he so loved and so thoroughly mastered the use of, Frederick never learnt to spell; and he was not more obstreperous in his youth under the rule of Fritz his father than he remained throughout recalcitrant to
"La grammaire qui sait régenter jusqu'au rois
Et les fait, la main haute, obéir à ses lois."
But this, though Carlyle humorously pretends to be puzzled by it, is not half so remarkable as the strong addiction of the great Frederick to literary trifling, which the same critic seriously contemns. The sharp knife of Carlyle minces such literary reputation as Macaulay had left him into contemptible fragments, and he sweeps them away with a besom of jeers. By Macaulay the blue-stocking King, half Mithridates, half Trissotin, had been exhibited bearing up against a world in arms with an ounce of poison in one pocket and a quire of bad verses in the other—verses hateful to gods and men, the insipid dregs of Voltaire's Hippocrene, the faint echo of the lyre of Chaulieu. And the worshipper Carlyle is even more disdainful.
When his hero retires into the country with hopes of a long future brightened by literature, the devotee has no respectful word to say of the Reinsberg Idyllium. His poetry, says Carlyle, came with uncommon fluency, but it was not a deep matter but a shallow one, corresponding to his animated fantasias on the flute. "Ever and anon through his life, on small hint from without or on great, there was found a certain leakage of verse." And his controversial efforts were hardly more respectable. He "confuted, or at least heartily contra3dicted," Macchiavelli's Prince in a book which came out simultaneously in three forms: one as corrected by Voltaire; one as originally handed to the bookseller, who thought Voltaire's alterations detrimental (very naturally, considering whose copy the good Van Duren was settingup); and another combining the two. The result of this royal act of authorship was what is now called a sensation. "The spectacle," says Carlyle—in the vein the contemplation of it could not but betray him into—"the spectacle of one who was himself a King stepping forth to say with conviction that Kingship was not a thing of Attorney mendacity to be done under the patronage of Beelzebub, but of human veracity to be set about under quite other patronage; and that, in fact, a King was the born servant of his People (domestique Friedrich once calls it) rather than otherwise: this naturally enough rose upon the populations unused to such language like the dawn of a new day."
But even from this high intellectual feat Frederick derived no permanent fame. One does not quite see why the fact that he was so much before his time should detract from the literary or political value of his criticisms on old Nicholas; but the truth is, the literary value was nil, and the political value was slight. Prince Fritz was not the first nor the last heir-apparent with a turn for Radicalism; and indeed this is a phase of royal life which it would need very fine authorship to render historically remarkable.
On the whole, Mr. Disraeli could hardly have chosen a worse example of the double-edged-weapon theory than this king, so great a sovereign and warrior, so small a littérateur. But it may be said, to the honour of their taste, perhaps, if not to the credit of their intellect, that the sovereigns who have sought to use the pen as a weapon are few indeed. The most remarkable of those who have done so is the present occupier of the imperial throne in France. He has lined the purple of the Second Empire with literary associations, besides rearing the noblest possible literary monument to the founder of the first. The extent of his authorship is probably known to very few; but his speculations as a journalist before he gained his present position were not less notable as justifications of his political capacity, than his "double-edged" Life of Cæsar is distinguished amongst historical apologies.
Our own Sovereign is happily absolved from all necessity of defence or attack. Beloved for herself, and honoured as the constitutional head of a free state, she needs literary as little as military defence. But since the unhappy event which beclouded her personal history though it could not darken the brightness of her reign, all her notable appearances have been in print. She has absented herself from state-ceremonies, but again and again her people have heard from her; and after some years her communications expanded from little notes of sympathy or remonstrance on social subjects into autobiographical contributions to literature which will always possess the deepest historic and personal interest. The frankness of her revelations of royal life gives them a piquancy in detail such as, in reference to other sovereigns of her line, has only been attained by traditionary Windsor gossip, or by the secondhand recollections of a Hervey, a Burney, or a Buckingham.
The Queen's Memoir of the Prince Consort and her sketches of their life in the Highlands are too fresh in the recollections of all readers to need a word of comment; but it is simple justice to say that there never grew beneath a royal hand words more sure to live, or so certain to insure for the writer the esteem and affection of posterity. To be a beloved exemplar is probably the highest ambition a female sovereign can legitimately entertain; and Queen Victoria, unconscious or unheedful of the few unmanly and audacious savageries perpetrated upon her in the much-abused name of Satire when in her grief she was doubly defenceless, has shown how gracefully a graphic pen may etch around a pure and comely royal life the soft shading of human sympathy and affection.
So excellent and, above all, so cheerful an employment of literary faculty stands infinitely higher than the mere gloomy poetisings with which several literary monarchs have beguiled their sorrow. Royal misfortunes have always been a fruitful source of royal literature. Cœur de Lion has the credit not only of a Provencal sonnet to Stephenetta, wife of Hugh de Baux, but also of several rather unknightly ditties on the subject of his long incarceration. Henry VI. wrote verses which Horace Walpole describes as "melancholy and simple, as we should expect, and not better than a saint might compose." Anne Boleyn, of whom it was said that when she danced her rare proportions varied themselves into all the graces that belong to either grace or motion, is credited by Sir John Hawkins with a very grievous copy of verses; but they are not so well authenticated as her more sprightly and winning letter to the king.
One of her successors, Catherine Parr,—though a shrewd little woman, who could seek to beguile Queen Mary into Protestantism by a correspondence advocating the production of Erasmus's Paraphrase on the Testament in the English vernacular,—had a very lachrymose vein. She wrote the Sweet Song of a Singer. This is supposed to be identical with her Lamentation of a Sinner bewailing the Ignorance of her blind Life, which is a very melancholy production in more senses than one. It is especially tearful in bemoaning the time and energy the ex-queen had wasted in fasts and pilgrimages which she now saw to be superstitious. As a proof that not all queenly authors are modest, it may be mentioned that this last of Harry VIII.'s wives entered into avowed competition with King David by composing fifteen psalms!
Horace Walpole and his editor have collected into a conveniently brief space many ana of this kind. As well as Richard I., Edward II. and Richard II. are amongst our early kings who, as Mallet says, "dipt at times their pens in ink." Edward VI., to the horror of the easy liberal Walpole, had written a comedy on the subject of the Scarlet Woman of Babylon, at an age when at least one of the words of its title ought to have been unintelligible to him. "Scribbling controversial ribaldry," however, was deemed highly meritorious in those days; and young Edward on Transubstantiation was as bitter, though hardly as interesting or spiritual, as one could desire. Even Mary figures in the list. As for Queen Elizabeth, besides other trifles, she produced a version of one of Seneca's tragedy-choruses, which proves her to have been a formidable rival in bombast to Ancient Pistol, and in euphuism to Lilly. James I. extorts respect by his Basilicon Doron; but incurs ridicule by his Demonologia, and contempt by the strange mixture of oaths, puns, quotations, witticisms, prerogative, scripture, superstition, and vanity which composed his Counterblast to Tobacco. Altogether it is an amusing catalogue, by which literature is more honoured by the attentions of kings and queens than they are distinguished by the brilliancy of their devoirs.
Poor Horace Walpole's attentions to royal authors brought upon him at least one gad-fly who knew how to buzz. And those who care about the matter may find a pamphlet, which was to have been followed by others that never appeared, in which his "false principles" were "confuted, and true ones established." The writer took high ground, and boasted that in his critical capacity he had acted as becomes a true lover of our country, and a firm believer of the Christian religion, with a sincere benevolence to all mankind. It is a pity modern critics have laid aside these affecting arts of rotund protestation. In our time John O'Connell could call Macaulay's History a Whig pamphlet, and not offer a single guarantee of his devotion to orthodoxy, the Constitution, and humanity. It was not so in 1759, when this remarkable nipt-bud of a pamphleteer tried to set Horace Walpole's teeth on edge.
He chiefly used as his authority Mr. Hume's history, "because," said he, "the Whigs cannot object to Mr. Hume's notions about liberty; but he regards truth and decency, which few of them do." Beginning with so much spirit, it is not wonderful that this forgotten critic, irate that Horace Walpole should have treated in an indecent manner so many of the crowned heads of England, should turn upon Horace's "great relation." Kindly recalling the scandal about Mrs. S—t and certain monetary troubles of the great Sir Robert, this emphatic gentleman more broadly than ingeniously intimates that that remarkable statesman, so far from being a great man, was a very great fool.
Amongst Horace Walpole's royal authors was Mary Queen of Scots. He allowed the variety of her accomplishments. He cited the distich which she altered from a fragment by Cæsar, and wrote on a window-pane at Buxton in honour of the Wells. He chronicled her poems on various occasions—her morceau in Brantome in honour of her husband, King Francis; her French verses to Queen Elizabeth; her letters to the Earl of Bothwell, which were sought to be proved forged, and many others dispersed through the works of Pope Pius V., Buchanan, Camden, Udal, and Sanderson. In fact he reared a more than sufficient monument to Queen Mary's literary taste. But he set her down generally in these very poignant words: "She had the misfortune to be born in the same age, in the same island with, and to be handsomer than Elizabeth, Mary had the weakness to set up a claim to a greater kingdom than her own without an army,"—Horace Walpole had no notion of people running counter to common sense,—"and was at last reduced by her crimes to be a saint in a religion which was opposite to what her rival preferred out of policy."
Surely the most inveterate misogynist could hardly have delivered a two-edged Ehud-thrust more savagely than this. The "anonymous author of the Remarks" quite loses his temper at the reflection on Queen Mary, and is driven frantic by that on Queen Elizabeth. "As to his saying Mary 'was reduced by her crimes to be a saint,' such a ridiculous remark could proceed from none but a very simple sinner." As to the supposition that Elizabeth was a Protestant from policy, that proved the "simple sinner"—by which epithet everyone must recognise Horace Walpole—"to have a poor opinion of the goodness of the Protestant cause."
Yet even on Queen Elizabeth Horace Walpole was not tempted by his cynical ideas of her and her Protestantism to pass an unfavourable literary judgment. Her politic quip about Transubstantiation excites his admiration. He fills pages with the titles of her Comment on Plato, her Two Orations of Isocrates, her translations of Euripides, Boethius, Xenophon, Horace, Sallust, and Margaret of Navarre, and letters and orations in abundance. But all failed to satisfy the remorseless author of the Remarks, who evidently supposed Horace Walpole recognised these achievements only in order to hint the insincerity and mercenary quality of Queen Bess's Protestantism.
It was hardly likely that an author who could thus attack Queen Elizabeth would be very tender with so inferior a person as Queen Anne. Mr. Walpole did not give her majesty a chapter to herself—she was not a royal author—but he, as the pamphlet critic says, "lugged her, without any seeming temptation or propriety," into a notice of Henry VIII. Even this royal writer was only included in the Walpolian catalogue in deference to tradition and the title "Defender of the Faith;" and Mr. Walpole grossly offended his critic by intimating, apropos of the Defence of the Sacraments, that neither it nor the Icon Basilike was written by the royal hand to which it was ascribed. But his great offence was that, in dealing with the title which this book—ascribed by Luther himself to other writers—gained for the eighth Harry, he spoke of it as suiting Henry equally well whether he burnt Papists or Protestants, and thus proceeded to the end of his wicked and Whiggish tether.
"Tt"—that is, the epithet "Defender of the Faith"—"suited each of his daughters, Mary and Elizabeth; it fitted the martyr Charles and the profligate Charles; the Romish James and the Calvinist William; and at last seemed peculiarly adapted to the weak head of the high-church Anne." This, indeed, is somewhat caustic. It was not the fashion in Walpole's days to keep literary and historical ideas even nominally distinct from politics. "If that good-natured queen," bursts forth the author of the Remarks—and in a note with funny egotism he compares the epithet good-natured, which seems common enough, to the simplex munditiis of Horace—"if that good-natured queen had treated her and the enemies of her house with half the severity they deserved, and which Queen Elizabeth would certainly have used, in all probability your great relation, if ever he had come out of the Tower, would have been exalted to a station widely different from that of prime minister."
Literary criticism of this sort is really quite reviving. Who would not treat of royal authors for the pleasure of being thus roundly handled? It is like Mordecai reviewing Haman. As Horace Walpole had dared to hint his belief in the amours of Elizabeth, Mordecai observes with intense and, as he says of Queen Anne, "entirely English" asperity, that "they are not at all to what he pretends to be the true design of his books, but they serve to blacken a crowned head, which is the high delight of a republican." Horace Walpole a republican!
But enough of these graver matters. Nor need we stay to settle the solemn question whether Charles I. wrote Icon Basilike, the book which sent Smollett, Sprat, and even Hume into ecstasies. It must be admitted that, whatever may be said of his prose, King Charles's poetry was at least as bad as his government, if the elegy written at Carisbroke was really his. Take a specimen:
"Nature and law by thy divine decree
(The only work of righteous loyalty)
With this dim diadem invested me.
With it the sacred sceptre, purple robe,
The holy unction, and the royal globe,
Yet I am levelled with the life of Job."
The following is even more spirited:
"Tyranny bears the title of taxation;
Revenge and robbery are reformation;
Oppression gains the name of sequestration."
If kings wrote thus before the Commonwealth, how wrote the bellmen?
Charles II. is appropriately known in literature only by a single amatory song, while James II. lives crowned with thorns in the frontispiece of a volume of meditations. It is gratifying to know that this arch-enemy of the Puritans hated theatres, and denounced romances as snares of the evil one. On these heads a wonderful unanimity has ever prevailed amongst fanatics of the most opposite colours. Bitter and narrow minds are naturally averse to what makes for cheerfulness; and find it much easier ignorantly to abstain, than wisely and religiously to reform. A much pleasanter Stuart to contemplate was the daughter of James I., known in history as the Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia. Her place in literary history is a small one, but the personal memories of her life, though it was not unchequered, are consistently pleasing. The poor lady loved her husband with a fidelity and simplicity happily not yet extinct amongst royal families ;and when separated from him, expressed it as simply as if her birth and station had been amongst the lowliest: "Croyez moi cher cœur que je me souhaite bien aupres de vous. Plut à Dieu q'eussions un petit coin au monde pour y vivre contents ensembles. C'est tout le bonheur que je me souhaite."
Her little corner was not to be found, but she came to be known as Queen of Hearts in the Low Countries, and lives sweetly in a byway of history which still blooms and bears flowerets. This was the queen, however, whom a caricaturist at Antwerp represented with her hair hanging about her ears, a child at her back, and the king—our James I.—her father, carrying the cradle after her. It was to her also that Francis Quarles—he of the quaint "Emblems"—was cupbearer. Except some letters in the Harleian Ms., she is not known to have written anything except a poem—which we should now consider a poor Sunday-school hymn, and a very long one—on the old theme—
"Theirs is a most wretched case
Who themselves so far disgrace
That they their affections place
Upon things named vile and base."
It must be admitted that the proneness of royal pens to anticipate or excel Sternhold and Hopkins has produced results far from brilliant or engaging.
Before quite quitting the Stuarts we may cast a glance at the poetic efforts of the early Scottish kings. One of them was alleged to have expended some vigour on the Apocalypse; but the sharp-voiced Pinkerton leaves the historian who said so to his Revelations. Whether James IV. "proceeded prophet" or not—to use a phrase of Swift—the earliest of his name achieved a rather exceptional reputation in England while a prisoner here, by a plaintive love-poem in honour of the lady he subsequently married. Another princely prisoner who won laurels among us by his pen was Charles Duke of Orleans and Milan, nephew of Charles VI. of France, and father of Louis XII. Made a prisoner at Agincourt, he lived twenty-five years at Woodbridge in Suffolk, and writing gave him elegant consolation.
In the Georgian era, royal literature is scarce; but that much-slighted Prince of Wales, the father of George III., is reputed author of a French chanson in the manner of his age, which is not without taste and gaiety. This heir-apparent, with all his faults, had a disposition to entertain literary angels, and was rewarded by at least one poetic eulogy:
"For to the few with sparks ethereal stored
He never barred his castle's genial gate,
But bade sweet Thomson share the friendly board,
Soothing with verse divine the toils of state.
Hence fired, the bard forsook the flowery plain,
And decked the royal mask and tried the tragic strain."
An awkward inference presents itself, that an English prince must be very much out of luck before he warmly favours literary companionship, and that such ill-assorted friendship is more likely to wean a poet from his true métier than to elevate a prince above the intellectual level of his order. Thomson, fired by the society of Frederick Prince of Wales, forsaking "the flowery plain," is an allegory for all seasons.
If we glance beyond the confines of our own country, several names stand forth in the roll of royal authors. King Bela of Hungary has a claim, though it is appropriately mythical, to appear there. King Dionysius of Portugal and his son Alfonso IV. are more distinctly inscribed. Alfonso X., surnamed the Wise—not because, like Sir Godfrey Kneller, he thought he could have given the Creator advice which would have much improved the universe—is one of the few literary monarchs who gave any thought to science. His Book of Complaints is declared by Sismondi to be worthy of the sentiments which ought to sustain a deposed monarch; but that seems a very vague and even equivocal compliment. This king, however, was a knowing one; for, chiefly with a view to debase the coinage with impunity, he declared he had discovered the philosopher's stone!
Of all royal authors, perhaps the prettiest things have been said of Marguerite Queen of Navarre, sister of Francis I., and writer of the Heptameron and other books. She was "ma mignonne" to her brother, and her name (which means 'pearl') was the occasion of innumerable complimentary puns. She was the Marguerite des Marguerites. She was a pearl surpassing the pearls of Orient, besides being—as so many other ladies have been—Tenth Muse. Marguerite wrote in almost every vein, from farce to pietism, from pure poetry to unclean fiction. Her best-known book is the oddest mixture ever known of lively incident, sprightly conversation, unqualified obseenity, spiritual biblical Protestantism (antedated), and curiously delicate, while curiously bold, sentimentalism.
For these days of "spiritual wives," the Heptameron is hardly too immoral perhaps, but infinitely too gross. Enough honour has never been done, however, to its better side, which shines the more brightly in the undimmed light of the personal character of this pearl of princesses.
Queen Margaret was not the first sovereign who had given the country she ruled literary distinction. In the first half of the thirteenth century Thibaud King of Navarre, honourably distinguished as Faiseur de Chansons, had won prime distinction by his poetry, as well as by his supposed attachment to Blanche of Castile, the mother of St. Louis. But even Sismondi and the Biographie Universelle give up the attempt to understand his royal muse. It was long the peculiarity of French poets to prefer antique words; and consequently they were left far behind prose-writers in comprehensibleness as well as in polish.
The ancient chroniclers, however, had the highest opinion of the great Faiseur. According to them, he made the most beautiful, delectable, and melodious songs ever heard. Moderns know better; and that not for want of appreciation-—for the troubadour-poets are admitted to have had chivalrous spirit, lively and touching sensibility, hardy and severe energy. Poor overrated Thibaud, on the other hand, though admitted to have naïveté, and pretty ideas now and then, is voted a mere fastidious repeater of the commonplaces of common poets in all ages.
Here is one royal "maker" come into disrepute, but he was a great man in his way and time; nor let it be forgotten that he is supposed to have been the first French writer who used feminine rhymes. We cannot part with royal authors in more creditable company. So, as the gallant Thibaud has lured us into the distant past, let us there part friends with Literature in the Purple, though the death of ex-King Louis of Bavaria—a poet in three volumes—the able criticism on the German War by the Count of Paris, and the Prince of Joinville's survey of French war-policy, unite with the Queen of England's livre de bonne foi to assure us that royalty still cherishes, fitfully but not unsuccessfully, the ambition to write.
Literature is the sternest though the gentlest of levellers, and there is no right divine to scratch Priscian, or to afflict the world's ear with tedious twaddle. But Literature in the Purple, though it cannot be said to have given the world a single great book, has substantially and honourably aggrandised, in all ages, the splendours of monarchy. At any rate we may charitably say with Scott:
"Kings do their best, and they and we
Must answer for the intent, and not the event."