Page:Australian views of England.djvu/51

  be monumentally recorded in prouder words of love and admiration. England is becoming a land of statues. It is beautiful to see in the bosom, as it were, of every city and town, the people's statue of the great minister who gave them untaxed bread, with the one word "Peel," in a taste so accordant with the unpretending respect of the poor, inscribed below. A few years hence every English child will have some local statue of Albert the Good, benignly crowning its earliest associations.

The services of Prince Albert were of a kind which the intelligent mechanics of England thoroughly appreciate. Those only who have seen the stalwart workman, with a delicate sensibility mantling his toil-stained face, when men of a condition superior to his own manifest an intelligent interest in his handiwork, will be able to comprehend the fulness of the English artisan's affection for a Prince who was not only acquainted with every branch of manufacturing art, but was himself the successful improver of several of the most beautiful productions of the English workshop. There is a very kingliness in the true type of the English mechanic. What can be more