Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood

alace-A touching Anecdote related by the Duke of Wellington-The Queen insists on paying her Father's Debts-The roma

he grace of her manners, and her prettiness. She is excessively like the Brunswicks and not like the Coburgs. So much the more in her favor. The me

king, whose honest face is fast fading quite away from old Eng

ently at the time of her accession, said to me the other day: "It is a great mistake to suppose that the Queen owed all the charming portraits which were drawn of her at this time, to the fortunate acc

sh fashion, but gorgeous enough to have served for the Queen of Sheba, Zenobia, Cleopatra, or Semiramis. It was all crimson velvet and silk, with any amount of gold embroi

on. A court-martial death sentence was presented by him to her, to be signed. She shrank from the

erted three times,"

Grace, th

, but there was somebody who spoke as to his good

ed off the word, "Pardoned," on the awful parchm

royal commission, ostensibly to "relieve Her Majesty of a painful duty," but really because they could not trust her soft heart. She

s, of course, done-the Queen also sending valuable pieces of plate to the largest creditors, as a token of her gratitude. Lord Melbourne said that the childlike directness and earnestness of that good daughter's manner when she thus expressed her royal will and pleasure, brought the tears to his eyes. It se

es of fairy lore. She called out such chivalrous feelings in young men that they longed to champion her on some field of battle, or in some perilous knightly adventure. She stirred the hearts and inspired the imaginations of orators and poets.- The great O'Connell, when there was some wild talk of deposing "the all but infant Queen," and putting the Duke of Cumberland in her place, said

e the Queen. He may have felt a preference for private life and rural pleasures, but as a loyal patriot he was ready to make the sacrifice. He drove in a stylish phaeton every morning to the Palace to inquire after Her Majesty's health; and on several days he bribed the men who had charge of the gardens to allow him to assist them in weeding about the piece of water opposite her apartments, in the fond hope of seeing her at the windows, and of her seeing him. Every evening, however, he put on the gentleman of fortune and phaetons, and followed the Queen and the Duchess in their airings. Drove they fast or drove they slow, he was just behind them. On their last drive before removing from Kensington, they alighted in the H

llowers were poor wretches-so poor that sometimes, after investing in pistols, they had not a six-pence left for ammunition. One, a distraught Fenian, pointed at her a broken, harmless weapon, charged with a scrap of red rag. Another, a humpbacked lad, named Bean, loaded his with paper and a few bits of an old clay pipe. Bean escaped for a time, and it is said that for several days there were

ession of Windsor Castl

, came also; this time

company-a lot of Kings

s second wife, a daugh

an

ed showing to her visitors her new home, her little cou

stairs, and in my

sets, spicy store-rooms, and huge

s an immense sacrifice of the then fashionable and costly flower, the dahlia, no fewer than twenty thousand being used for decorative purposes. But a sadder because a vain sacrifice on this occasion, was of flowers of rhetoric. An address

ne, and shut up for threatening the life of the Queen and the Duchess of Kent. So Victoria's life was not al