Queen VICTORIA, with her husband and eldest child, has left
Windsor Castle, to seek strength and pleasure in the bracing mountain-air of the Scottish Highlands. Her journey has been performed, and with royal speed; for the voyage from Woolwich to the Tay was accomplished in less than forty-two hours, and the drive from Dundee to her Atholl residence in less than six hours. The better to profit by the retreat, the Queen maintains comparative privacy : some disappointment, no doubt, to the ardent Scots, but as certainly a substantial gain to the ruaticater. idarchings and countermarchings, and combats of courtesies with obsequious corporations, are not the best way to enjoy the beauties or renovating freshness of nature.
The Queen, then, has not gone to Ireland. How the ultra-cordial and loyal Irish would have delighted in the visitation ! but it seems that it could not be. The manner in which the Repealers magnified difficulties and hinted at disagreeables, looks as if they did not wish it—as if they dreaded the importation of a rival in- fluence, and dared not trust the common herd of their followers within the genial blaze of royalty, for fear their fidelity to Repeal, its self-denials and rents, should melt away. A few appeared even disposed to countenance a marked slight to the Sovereign—as when one of them said that he should not appear in her train I There might, therefore, have happened some awkward mischance among the misled populace. But, on the other hand, Sir ROBERT PEEL was undoubtedly right when he anticipated the pacifying and healing effect of the Royal presence on the Irish shore. Perhaps it would have been more humane and wiser if the PEED-WELLINGTON Ministry had not yielded to this Dublin de- terrer, borrowed from that mistake of Sir JOHN KEY'S which told so infelicitously upon the same Cabinet leaders in 1830.
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