Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria, vol 1 | Page 3

and ailing, and there was no royal lady, not merely to hold a
Drawing-room, but to lend the necessary touch of dignity and decorum
to the gaieties of the season. The exigency lent a new impetus to the
famous balls at Almack's. An anonymous novel of the day, full of
society scandal and satire, described the despotic sway of the lady
patronesses, the struggles and intrigues for vouchers, and the
distinguished crowd when the object was obtained. The earlier hours,
alas! only gave longer time for the drinking habits of the Regency.
It is a little difficult to understand what young people did with
themselves in the country when lawn-tennis and croquet were not.
There was archery for the few, and a good deal more amateur
gardening and walking, with field-sports, of course, for the lads.
The theatre in 1819 was more popular than it showed itself twenty
years later. Every country town of any pretensions, in addition to its
assembly rooms had its theatre, which reared good actors, to which
provincial tours brought London stars. Genteel comedy was not past its
perfection. Adaptations of the Waverley novels, with musical dramas
and melodramas, drew great houses. Miss O'Neill had just retired, but
Ellen Tree was making a success, and Macready was already
distinguished in his profession. Still the excellence and prestige of the
stage had declined incontestably since the days of Mrs. Siddons and
John Kemble. Edmund Kean, though he did much for tragedy, had a
short time to do it in, and was not equal in his passion of genius to the
sustained majesty of the sister and brother.
In the same way, the painters' art hovered on the borders of a brilliant
epoch. For Lawrence, with his courtly brush, which preferred flattery to
truth and cloying suavity to noble simplicity, was not worthy to be
named in the same breath with Reynolds. Raeburn came nearer, but his
reputation was Scotch. Blake in his inspiration was regarded, not
without reason, as a madman. Flaxman called for classic taste to
appreciate him; and the fame of English art would have suffered both at
home and abroad if a simple, manly lad had not quitted a Scotch manse
and sailed from Leith to London, bringing with him indelible memories
of the humour and the pathos of peasant life, and reproducing them
with such graphic fidelity, power, and tenderness that the whole world

has heard of David Wilkie.
The pause between sunset and sunrise, the interregnum which signifies
that a phase in some department of the world's history has passed away
as a day is done, and a new development of human experience is about
to present itself, was over in literature. The romantic period had
succeeded the classic. Scott, Coleridge, Southey (Wordsworth stands
alone), Byron, Shelley, Keats, Campbell, Moore, were all in the field as
poets, carrying the young world with them, and replacing their
immediate predecessors, Cowper, Thompson, Young, Beattie, and
others of less note.
Sir Walter Scott had also risen high above the horizon as a poet, and
still higher as a novelist.
A great start in periodical literature was made in 1802 by the
establishment of _The Edinburgh Review_, under Jeffrey and Sydney
Smith, and again in 1817 by the publication of _Blackmoods
Magazine_, with Christopher North for its editor, and Lockhart, De
Quincey, Hogg, and Delta among its earlier contributors. The people's
friend, Charles Knight, was still editing The Windsor and Eton Express.
In 1819 Sir Humphry Davy was the most popular exponent of science,
Sir James Mackintosh of philosophy. In politics, above the
thunderstorm of discontent, there was again the pause which anticipates
a fresh advance. The great Whig and Tory statesmen, Charles James
Fox and William Pitt, were dead in 1806, and their mantles did not fall
immediately on fit successors. The abolition of the slave-trade, for
which Wilberforce, Zachary Macaulay, and Clarkson had fought
gallantly and devotedly, was accomplished. But the Catholic
Emancipation Bill was still to work its way in the teeth of bitter "No
Popery" traditions, and Earl Grey's Reform Bill had not yet seen the
light.
George III.'s long reign was drawing to a close. What changes it had
seen from the War of American Independence to Waterloo! What
woeful personal contrasts since the honest, kindly, comely lad, in his
simple kingliness, rode out in the summer sunshine past Holland House,
where lady Sarah Lennox was making hay on the lawn, to the days
when the blind, mad old king sat in bodily and mental darkness,
isolated from the wife and children he had loved so well, immured in
his distant palace-rooms in royal Windsor.

His silver beard o'er a bosom spread Unvexed by life's commotion,
Like a yearly lengthening snow-drift shed On the calm of a frozen
ocean:
Still o'er him oblivion's