most arduous part
of it. Albert was easily dispirited: what was the use of struggling to
perform in a role which bored him and which, it was quite clear, nobody
but the dear good Baron had any desire that he should take up? It was
simpler, and it saved a great deal of trouble, to let things slide.
But Stockmar would not have it. Incessantly, he harped upon two
strings--Albert's sense of duty and his personal pride. Had the Prince
forgotten the noble aims to which his life was to be devoted? And was he
going to allow himself, his wife, his family, his whole existence, to be
governed by Baroness Lehzen? The latter consideration was a potent one.
Albert had never been accustomed to giving way; and now, more than ever
before, it would be humiliating to do so. Not only was he constantly
exasperated by the position of the Baroness in the royal household;
there was another and a still more serious cause of complaint. He was,
he knew very well, his wife's intellectual superior, and yet he found,
to his intense annoyance, that there were parts of her mind over which
he exercised no influence. When, urged on by the Baron, he attempted
to discuss politics with Victoria, she eluded the subject, drifted into
generalities, and then began to talk of something else. She was treating
him as she had once treated their uncle Leopold. When at last he
protested, she replied that her conduct was merely the result of
indolence; that when she was with him she could not bear to bother her
head with anything so dull as politics. The excuse was worse than the
fault: was he the wife and she the husband? It almost seemed so. But the
Baron declared that the root of the mischief was Lehzen: that it was she
who encouraged the Queen to have secrets; who did worse--undermined
the natural ingenuousness of Victoria, and induced her to give,
unconsciously no doubt, false reasons to explain away her conduct.

Minor disagreements made matters worse. The royal couple differed in
their tastes. Albert, brought up in a regime of Spartan simplicity and
early hours, found the great Court functions intolerably wearisome,
and was invariably observed to be nodding on the sofa at half-past ten;
while the Queen's favourite form of enjoyment was to dance through the
night, and then, going out into the portico of the Palace, watch the sun
rise behind St. Paul's and the towers of Westminster. She loved London
and he detested it. It was only in Windsor that he felt he could