parents, more and more involved in
family cares and family happiness, found the pomp of Windsor galling,
and longed for some more intimate and remote retreat. On the advice of
Peel they purchased the estate of Osborne, in the Isle of Wight. Their
skill and economy in financial matters had enabled them to lay aside a
substantial sum of money; and they could afford, out of their savings,
not merely to buy the property but to build a new house for themselves
and to furnish it at a cost of L200,000. At Osborne, by the sea-shore,
and among the woods, which Albert, with memories of Rosenau in his mind,
had so carefully planted, the royal family spent every hour that could
be snatched from Windsor and London--delightful hours of deep retirement
and peaceful work. The public looked on with approval. A few aristocrats
might sniff or titter; but with the nation at large the Queen was now
once more extremely popular. The middle-classes, in particular, were
pleased. They liked a love-match; they liked a household which combined
the advantages of royalty and virtue, and in which they seemed to see,
reflected as in some resplendent looking-glass, the ideal image of the
very lives they led themselves. Their own existences, less exalted,
but oh! so soothingly similar, acquired an added excellence, an added
succulence, from the early hours, the regularity, the plain tuckers, the
round games, the roast beef and Yorkshire pudding oft Osborne. It was
indeed a model Court. Not only were its central personages the patterns
of propriety, but no breath of scandal, no shadow of indecorum, might
approach its utmost boundaries. For Victoria, with all the zeal of a
convert, upheld now the standard of moral purity with an inflexibility
surpassing, if that were possible, Albert's own. She blushed to think
how she had once believed--how she had once actually told HIM--that one
might be too strict and particular in such matters, and that one ought
to be indulgent towards other people's dreadful sins. But she was
no longer Lord M's pupil: she was Albert's wife. She was more--the
embodiment, the living apex of a new era in the generations of mankind.
The last vestige of the eighteenth century had disappeared; cynicism and
subtlety were shrivelled into powder; and duty, industry, morality, and
domesticity triumphed over them. Even the very chairs and tables had
assumed, with a singular responsiveness, the forms of prim solidity. The
Victorian Age was in f