ough he held no high
position of State, can with justice be regarded as both friend and
adviser of the Queen--John Brown. He entered the Queen's service at
Balmoral, became later a gillie to the Prince Consort, and in 1851
the Queen's personal outdoor attendant. He was a man of a very
straightforward nature and blunt speech, and even his Royal Mistress
was not safe at times from criticism. In spite of his rough manner,
he possessed many admirable qualities, and on his death in 1883 the
Queen caused a granite seat to be erected in the grounds of Osborne
with the following inscription:

A TRUER, NOBLER, TRUSTIER HEART, MORE LOVING
AND MORE LOYAL, NEVER BEAT WITHIN
A HUMAN BREAST.

CHAPTER XIII: _Queen and Empire_

What should they know of England who only England know?

The England of Queen Elizabeth was the England of Shakespeare:

This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise;
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war;
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands;
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

In Tennyson's _Princess_ we find an echo of these words, where the
poet, in contrasting England and France, monarchy and republic--much
to the disadvantage of the latter--says:

God bless the narrow sea which keeps her off,
And keeps our Britain, whole within herself,
A nation yet, the rulers and the ruled.

But at a later date, in an "Epilogue to the Queen," at the close of
the _Idylls of the King_, Tennyson has said farewell to his narrow
insular views, and speaks of

Our ocean-empire with her boundless homes
For ever-broadening England, and her throne
In our vast Orient, and one isle, one isle,
That knows not her own greatness: if she knows
And dreads it we are fall'n.

He had come to recognize the necessity for guarding and maintaining
the Empire, with all its greatness and all its burdens, as part of
this country's destiny.

It is a little difficult to realize that the British Empire, as we
now know it, has been created within only the last hundred years.
Beaconsfield, in his novel _Contarini Fleming_, desc