ROYAL SOLITUDE.
THE Queen, naturally anxious to get a little time to herself amid the pageant-duties of royalty, has contrived a plan of keeping her intrusive subjects at arms-length, more efficient than cordons of troops. By holding the high seas from Woolwich to Dundee, hurrying through the latter town, and scampering along the nearest road to Blair, she has, at the cost of a moment's rubbing of elbows with a crowd at the seaport, contrived effectually to sequester her- self from all observers. For miles around the Castle, there are few roofs to shelter curious intrusives, and the immigration of two or three score of hungry sight-seekers would create a famine in " the Blair " in the course of a couple of days. If they proved impor- tunate, her Majesty could, by merely keeping the park-gates shut and the fences watched, have starved her persecutors out in forty- eight hours.
This will be an mra in the annals of the Royal pair—it is an wra in the annals of European sovereigns. To parallel the present seclusion of the Court of England, we must go back to Seged Em- peror of Ethiopia in search of one day's happiness, Kubla Khan after he had girdled in with walls or towns twelve leagues of fer- tile ground, or some Ottoman Emperor intrenched behind the walls of the seraglio. Queen VICTORIA and Prince ALBERT may now almost be able to form some conception of the retirement of private life. If imaginative, they may institute comparisons be- tween themselves and Robinson Crusoe with Poll and Friday, or at least with Rasselas in the Happy Valley and Sadak at the Waters of Oblivion. They may even take upon them to enact Cowrsa peeping at the world through the loopholes of retreat ; and unfold the newspaper after they have closed the curtain and wheeled the sofa round, with little more danger of finding an ob- trusive paragraph about themselves than the poet. Or they may fancy themselves Fergus and Flora Maclvor amid the belted plaids and broad swords of their clan. Or, if they have no such fancies, they will only the more resemble their prototypes, who were merely creatures of the imagination, and not necessarily themselves imaginative.
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