There has been some feeling that pageants have of late
been a little too numerous ; but it is not, we think, altogether well founded. Although we hold strongly, as Queen Victoria also held, that a certain habitual seclusion is essential to the dignity of a Constitutional Monarch, it is natural that it should be broken through at the beginning of a reign when the people are eager to see their new Sovereign with their own eyes. And though the method adopted here, as in all other countries, is somewhat cumbrous and costly, still cumbrousness is of the essence of pageantry, and the cost is not badly expended if it breaks for a day or two the grey monotony of customary labour. The only reasonable objection we have ever heard to an occasional pageant of the sort is that the capital gets rather more than its share ; but that, though true, is nothing to grumble at, while by a law of Nature everything must be somewhere. Even a vote of Parliament cannot make a centre a circumference. Frequent pageants would be incon- sistent both with modern circumstances and with the modern national character; but to pageants which mark great events, or which are heartily desired by the people, we see nothing to object. Nobody in the household really grudges the cost of the bride's dress ; and pageants are not likely to be too many while they involve the endurance which the King must have displayed in that slow drive of eight miles at the end of a damp and chilly October.
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