THE DUKE OF ALBANY.
THE pain felt in England at the death of the Duke of Albany is, of course, in great measure, due to a feeling for the Queen. The Queen has a place in her people's thoughts which. no one of the Royal Family possesses, she is the most visible person in her kingdom, and as the years roll on, and stroke- after stroke falls upon her, and she is left more and more lonely, with less and less of strength to struggle against her loneliness, their reverence becomes mixed with pitying affection. Half the women in her dominions speak of her now as "the poor Queen," and they imply much affection as well as pity in that common- place adjective. They perceive instinctively that domestic losses, if felt at all by Princes, must be felt as terrible blows; The relationships of Kings are of more value to them than to other mortals, for if they are pleasant at all, they are friend. ships also, untainted with that sense of inequality which can never quit those who reign, and which separates them by an impalpable wall from all but their few equals, whom they seldom see, and their own immediate kin. The exaggerated statements in the Times about the effect of the shock of the news upon her Majesty's health reflected accurately enough the first fear of nine in ten of those who read the mournful announcement, a fear very often expressed in words. The Prince was the youngest son, his health had always made him more of a home-bird than his brothers, and the likeness between his tastes and his father's must have been an additional bond. We all say, when occasion arises, that our children are exactly alike to us; but we all, eon-
scionsly or unconsciously, lie in saying it, and it was only natural for Englishmen to think that the sudden death of her favourite son "would half kill the Queen." The first feeling was for her, bat, nevertheless, there was honest regret for Prince Leopold too, not only as a young man in high place prema- turely cut off, but as a personage with an acceptable individuality of his own. It was understood— truly, it would appear—that he was a man of the student kind,
who read and enjoyed literature, and knew something of art, and could make a reflective speech, and, indeed, thought, or strove to think, more deeply than the majority of his kind. He was known to prefer savants to soldiers, libraries to reviews, study to violent amusement; and those preferences made him a separate, and therefore an interesting figure. We do not know that Englishmen love students, and are quite certain that they did not love Prince Albert, who was an abler proto- type of his son, till his death revealed his usefulness to the State ; but they are attracted by variety, and the variety among Princes is not great, while it includes very few of Prince Leopold's special type. Most of the Princes of Europe are either pleasure-lovers, or ordinary officers of different de- grees of capacity, or moody recluses; and when they depart from the usual, and show themselves students, like the reigning Duke of Coburg, or artist-dreamers, like the King of Bavaria, they are apt to be too separate for their subjects' understanding. A Prince who was at once "literary" and intelligible was attrac- tive, and Prince Leopold enjoyed from his first appearances in public an amount of popular favour which, we have heard, occa- sionally surprised himself. He "did not see," he said, "why everybody was always so kind to him."
The rarity of student Princes is notable, and is due, we imagine, to a great number of converging causes. One would expect, under the law . of averages, that the Beauclerk should periodically reappear upon the Throne ; but in truth, it is surprising that there ever was one. Princes who expect to reign have much to do to acquire even indis- pensable knowledge. Their fathers rarely give them student governors, wisely holding that, for them, judgment is a more valuable quality than learning, and the lads around them are chosen from among the idlest of mankind. They have always to acquire at least two languages, with such perfectness that in speaking them they shall give no impression either of ignorance or bad breeding. It would not do for a King to talk French of Stratford-atte-Bowe, for Frenchmen would esteem that boorish, or to compliment a lady, as a German sovereign prince once did, on her "exquisite leather." They must always learn something of politics, something of soldiership, something of the condition of the world, and something of history, if it be only that of their own State. It is seldom much, though the Prince of Wales's often- mentioned slip, "my ancestor, Queen Elizabeth," was probably due not to ignorance, but to unreadiness in the selection of a word, but it mast always take some time. Men, too, must be studied, and all about men—their characters, fortunes, families, and careers—or the Prince will enter life unprovided with the most necessary of all information, the current coin of know- ledge, and will, in pare unconsciousness, make twenty enemies a day. It is difficult, unless the mind has some determined bias, to become learned amidst such distractions, as diffi- cult as it is for a man with a fair capacity for music, but no genies, to become a first-rate performer on a dozen
instruments at once. It is much if the Prince is not half-dazed, as the Heir Apparent of Austria was, in boy- hood, and if he obtains through his studies that readiness to acquire, that receptive faculty for knowledge which is the beet working substitute for learning. He will not have the advantage other men have of beginning to learn when they have finished their education. Most men who understand their own careers will confess that it was not in boyhood, but after twenty that they learned what they know, all previous acquisition having been more or less in the nature of the use of tools, and nutri- tive study beginning when it seemed to cease. Princes, unless, like Prince Leopold, disabled from activity by ill-health, can hardly study in adolescence and manhood. Life is too full both of duties and pleasures, there is too much to see and do, and the ex- ternal pressure begins to be too sharp. Most Princes are never alone, and when they are, it is only by dint of vigilance, and by keeping off the external world as if it were hostile, for short and often occupied periods of time. The mere ceremonial of such a position shortens life, and the journeyings, visits, conversations which cannot be avoided, eat up much of the remaining leisure. A young man in business is hardly expected to study, and a Prince, separate as his business is, is expected by the world, or rather compelled by the world, to occupy himself in doing it.
The papers, we note, were careful to say that Prince Leopold went very deeply into nothing ; but the credit to him is that, amid such distractions, he went so deeply into some things as he did. Most men would have given up the effort to study altogether.
It is not to be wondered at that, as a rule which has had few exceptions in history, Princes with their time thus filled up and their attention thus called off from study, should have fallen, as regards the acquisition of knowledge, into a temptation almost peculiar to themselves, or shared only with a few men unusually placed, of whom the late Lord Beaconsfield was one, and any Premier's studious son would probably be another. It is con- sidered a truism to say that there is no Royal road to learning ; but there is one, for all that, and it is one which studious Royal- ties very often tread. It is possible, under certain conditions, to obtain from conversation with finished experts, men who really know their subjects through and through, a great many, nearly all, of the results of learning. A language cannot, indeed, _ be got up so, or a literature, except imperfectly, but on many subjects the mind can "be stored very rapidly with effective knowledge. Ministers learn nearly all they use as knowledge in this way, and are not ignorant of their subjects either. The conditions of learning by the Royal road are that the expert shall be willing to teach, that he shall not be .irritated by questions, and that he shall be aware of a necessity for talking to the point, and consequently avoiding diffuse- ness. Experts conversing with Princes will submit to those conditions, for they feel not only honoured by the con- versation, but genuinely anxious to secure for their views so important an audience. They exert themselves and teach for the nonce, as some finished lecturers can, cramming into an hour the instruction which it would take a week to obtain from books. A Prince has the readiest access to such men, understands very quickly how much they can communicate, and thenceforward feels a taste for the pemmican of knowledge almost fatal to the enjoyment of unconeentrated food. He can obtain knowledge through chat, and any other mode of obtain- ing it becomes wearisome in the extreme. This temptation is, of all others, the most fatal to study, if only because the know- ledge obtained in this way may be most valuable. Its only defects indeed are an inevitable incompleteness, neither pupil nor teacher precisely seeing what is left out, and a strain upon the memory to which it presently proves unequal. Lord Melbourne could in this way, as Sydney Smith said, learn all about melting tallow in readiness for a debate, but twelve months afterwards he would know about melting tallow only one or two unconnected details, which, from some accidental cause, probably a certain raciness of description in his tallow-dipping friend, had made on his memory an unusual impact. Prince Leopold probably knew as much as most studious Princes, but he had early learned the "Royal road," and that makes Princes intelligent rather than wise, ready men rather than men of any deep learning. An intelligent and ready limn is, however, often the pleasantest of men ; and when a Prince has those qualities, those who care for Princes have much reason to be thankful, and more for sincere regret when they have passed away.
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