that the Prince was suffering from fever, unattended by unfavourable symptoms, but likely from its nature to continue for some time. On the 12th it was announced that "the symptoms have undergone but little change." On the 13th no bulletin was issued. On the morning of the 14th there was some mitigation in the severity of the symptoms, and at noon the gratifying intelligence was received at Buckingham Palace that there was a slight change for the better; but in the afternoon the Globe published a telegram sent at half-past four from Windsor, stating that the Prince was in a most critical state; and from that time the symptoms took a very unfavourable turn, fever of the typhoid kind set in, and the Prince quietly and without suffering continued slowly to sink-so slowly that the wrists were pulseless long before the last moment had arrived.

The Athenæum in its notice on December National loss 21st says: by his death.

"In the Prince who is gone the Arts and Sciences have lost their truest friend, -Manners and Morals their first example,Education and Public Progress their strongest support; and if the loss shall prove to be not irreparable, it will be because his provident sagacity has trained his children for the task of guiding this great empire in the path of social and moral reform along which it is now travel

ling fast......The Prince's fortunes were, on the whole, as happy as his disposition; and the instant and unstudied grief of all classes, on the announcement of his death, is the truest test of the profound and universal popularity which surrounded him, unseen and unheard, in his daily life. Prince Albert understood his country and his time. Leaving the strife of ordinary politics to those who had the taste and the right to enter into such contests, he devoted himself to the higher range of scientific questions and social charities, in which no one could dispute his pre-eminence or interfere with his usefulness. Denied a material, he made for himself an intellectual and invisible throne...... It is no more than his due to say that all his eminent abilities-all his splendid opportunities -were devoted to the noblest ends. The Prince Consort had an instinctive love of peace, of industry, of progress. Progress was, indeed, his constant theme. What the word Duty was Albert the to Arthur the Great, the word Progress was to Albert the Good. No other word turns up so often in his speeches, no other idea was so constantly present in his mind. No sacrifice of time, labour, thought, money, or responsibility seemed to him too great when he could make it in the cause of national or individual Progress. ......In the name of Progress he raised the

Good: his love of progress.

Crystal Palace in Hyde Park,—where we hope ere long to see a fitting monument to his name arise. In the name of Progress he was lending, to the hour of his death, his invaluable aid to those who are charged by Her Majesty and by the nation with the great task of erecting its successor at South Kensington. Every good cause might count on his voice, his hand, and The Prince his purse. When the Domestic Servants' and domestic servants. patrons asked him to take the chair at a meeting in their behalf, the case they put to him was -that the domestic servants of the metropolis often suffer great privations in old age; that they were making some efforts to help themselves; and that his appearance in their cause would be good for them; his reply was :'After what you tell me, I should be wanting in my duty if I did not take the chair'; and he took it. One of his very last public acts was to subscribe a hundred pounds for the purchase of Shakspeare's house and garden. It was by genuine sympathy and genuine work that the Prince Consort gained the empire which he held over the best minds in all countries; an empire more extensive and more enduring than that visible empire on which the sun never sets."

CHAPTER V.

THE ATHENÆUM, 1862-1865.

International

THE season of 1862 was one bright in attraction and abounding in festivity. The Great The Great International Exhibition, which was to have Exhibition. been held in 1861, but was postponed on account of the war in Italy in 1859, was opened by the Duke of Cambridge on the 1st of May. From the 5th to the 14th of June the Social Science Association and the Congrès International de Bienfaisance held their meetings in London, the Palace at Westminster being thrown open on the 7th for a public reception. At the Crystal Palace there was the Handel Festival, great flower shows were held in the gardens of the Royal Horticultural Society, while the museums and galleries drew their crowds, Frith's Railway Station,' on view in the Haymarket, having as many as a thousand visitors daily.

On the 3rd of May the Athenæum gives a description of the Great Exhibition building, the opening ceremony, and of the picture galleries "the long and splendid series of saloons,

bright with the pictorial genius of all the modern world"; while in the general Exhibition "it seems as if nothing is absent, from the poorest toy a peasant's child can buy to the mightiest engine England can produce. All powers of war and peace-all the arts produce, from the perfect picture to the drudging household implement, have found a place. Shells from the seabottom, and the instrument that brought them first before the eyes of men, lie side by side with the red pine-cone that rocked in Columbian winds. The whole circle of the globe seems Its repre- here in miniature, and of all things only one racter. thing missed-universally missed, as universally

sentative cha

regretted — the bodily presence of him who, more probably than other men, might rightly receive thanks for the result. With due honour to those who were his fellows in this labour, there was not absent on Thursday morning from any man's thoughts a sympathy with Her who has lost more than we have lost, and who must derive supreme satisfaction from knowing how well the common object has prospered to the end."

On the 7th of June it is announced that the Queen "has purchased 1,000 half-crown tickets. for the International Exhibition, to be given in her name to deserving pupils of the various schools of design. She has also purchased