re Lord Palmerston's defects, doubtless grated on
Prince Albert, who had a scholar's caution and a scholar's courage. The
facts will be known to our children's children, though not to us.
Prince Albert did much, but he died ere he could have made his
influence felt on a generation of statesmen less experienced than he
was, and anxious to learn from him.

It would be childish to suppose that a conference between a Minister
and his sovereign can ever be a conference of pure argument. "The
divinity which doth hedge a king" may have less sanctity than it had,
but it still has much sanctity. No one, or scarcely any one, can argue
with a Cabinet Minister in his own room as well as he would argue with
another man in another room. He cannot make his own points as well; he
cannot unmake as well the points presented to him. A monarch's room is
worse. The best instance is Lord Chatham, the most dictatorial and
imperious of English statesmen, and almost the first English statesman
who was borne into power against the wishes of the king and against the
wishes of the nobility--the first popular Minister. We might have
expected a proud tribune of the people to be dictatorial to his
sovereign--to be to the king what he was to all others. On the
contrary, he was the slave of his own imagination; there was a kind of
mystic enchantment in vicinity to the monarch which divested him of his
ordinary nature. "The least peep into the king's closet," said Mr.
Burke, "intoxicates him, and will to the end of his life." A wit said
that, even at the levee, he bowed so low that you could see the tip of
his hooked nose between his legs. He was in the habit of kneeling at
the bedside of George III. while transacting business. Now no man can
ARGUE on his knees. The same superstitious feeling which keeps him in
that physical attitude will keep him in a corresponding mental
attitude. He will not refute the bad arguments of the king as he will
refute another man's bad arguments. He will not state his own best
arguments effectively and incisively when he knows that the king would
not like to hear them. In a nearly balanced argument the king must
always have the better, and in politics many most important arguments
are nearly balanced. Whenever there was much to be said for the king's
opinion it would have its full weight; whatever was said for the
Minister's opinion would only have a lessened and enfeebled weight.

The king, too, possesses a power, accord