volume is precisely what its title-page promises,—an account of
the career of the Prince of Wales, "including his Birth, Educe.- tion, Travels, Marriage, and Home Life ; and Philanthropic, Social, and Political Work." It is a gathering together into book-
form of records we have all read piecemeal in newspapers, and contemporary memoirs of the official life of the Queen's eldest son and Heir-Apparent. More than this no Life of the Prince published in his lifetime could possibly be. And many will be inclined to say that this being the case, it would have been better to have pub- lished no memoir at all. But after all it seems to us that the
book justifies its existence. We were all busy last year reviewing the sixty years behind us from the point of view of the Sovereign who came straight from the schoolroom to the throne, and won her life's experience while doing her life's work in the position of highest dignity and authority; and now it is not amiss to review almost the whole of the period once again from the point of view of the Prince, to whom the time has been a long serving of apprenticeship to the same calling. When the Prince was five years old the question " Who should educate him ? " and how he should be educated, seriously agitated not only his father and mother, but all the grave and responsible heads in the Kingdom. And it is neither uninteresting nor unprofitable to the public to be told, in a book from which all the impertinences of the society journals are very properly excluded, with what excellent common- sense everything was planned and carried out with a. view to making the future King of England a thorough Englishman, a courteous gentleman, a well-informed man-of-the-world, and an admirable man of business. The book has, moreover, points and passages that suggest thoughts of deeper bearing. It takes us through the anxious times of the Prince's illness and the death of the Duke of Clarence, and it dwells with reserved emphasis upon his close relation during the years of adolescence with men like Dean Stanley and Charles Kingsley. The hearts of Princes are, after all, hearts of men, and the great moment at Bethany that was so much to Dean Stanley may not have been less to the companion he was so earnest to be alone with in that hour of solemn impressions. In anecdote the book is not very rich, and what it has of this kind belongs almost wholly to the years of childhood. Best of all is the Royal nurse's rebuking answer to the Duke of Wellington when he inquired about the new-born baby, " Is it a boy ? "—" It's a Prince, your Grace." And next best is the Prince's appeal to the Empress Eugenie to beg his father and mother to allow him and the Princess Royal to stay on a little longer in Paris after a much-enjoyed visit. The Empress suggested that the Queen and Prince Consort would not be able to do without their children. But this view of the matter seemed absurd to the Prince of Wales. "Not do without us ! don't fancy that, for there are six more of us at home ; and they don't want us." One is grateful to the anonymous compiler for having put in the jolly verses with which Punch welcomed the Prince on his coming into the world :— " Hums, we've a little Prince at last, A roaring Royal boy ;
And all day long the booming bells Have rung their peals of Joy.
And the little park guns have blazed away, And made a tremendous nom, Whilst the air has been filled since eleven o'clock
With the shouts of little boys."
There are a great many interesting portraits in the book. Some of those of the Royal children in infancy are perfectly charming ; others delight us by their quaintness. "The Prince in 1859," by the elder Richmond, is a most refined and beautiful piece of work, and so is a portrait by Lauchert of the Princess of Wales in a diaphanous white dress and scarf. But it is not only the pretty and graceful pictures that we like to look through. Some of the most prosaic and commonplace of the family groups revive more vividly than anything else could, the time and the occasion of their production. The pictures from the Illustrated London News of 'the great ball given in honour of the Prince at the Academy of Music, New York, in 1860, and of the garden party at Marl-
borough House in 1881, are worth preserving as studies of
Previous page
