Page:Dictionary of National Biography. Sup. Vol III (1901).djvu/479

 Tait, then bishop of London, had voted with the majority. A collision between the two houses always seemed to the queen to shake the constitution, and she knew that in a case like the present the upper house must invite defeat in the conflict. She therefore, on her own initiative, proposed to mediate between the government and the House of Lords. Gladstone welcomed her intervention, and was conciliatory.

Accordingly, the day before parliament opened, 15 Feb. 1869, the queen asked Tait whether the House of Lords could not be persuaded to give way. Gladstone, she said, 'seems really moderate.' The principle of disestablishment must be conceded, but the details might well be the subject of future discussion and negotiation. At her request Tait and Gladstone met in consultation. After the bill had passed through the House of Commons with enormous majorities (31 May), she importuned Tait to secure the second reading in the lords, with the result that it was carried by 33 (18 June). But greater efforts on the queen's part were required before the crisis was at an end. The amendments adopted by the lords were for the most part rejected by Gladstone. On 11 June the queen pressed on both sides the need of concessions, and strongly deprecated a continuance of the struggle. At length the government gave way on certain subsidiary points, and the bill passed safely its last stages (Life of Tait, ii. passim). How much of the result was due to the queen's interference, and how much to the stress of events, may be matter for argument; but there is no disputing that throughout this episode she oiled the wheels of the constitutional machinery.

During this anxious period the queen's public activities were mainly limited to a review of troops at Aldershot on 17 April. On 25 May she celebrated quietly her fiftieth birthday, and at the end of June entertained for a second time the khedive of Egypt. On 28 June she gave a 'breakfast' or afternoon party in his honour at Buckingham Palace the main festivity in which she took part during the season. In the course of her autumn visit to Balmoral she went on a tour through the Trossachs and visited Loch Lomond. Towards the end of the year, 6 Nov., she made one of her rare passages through London, and the first since widowhood. She opened Blackfriars Bridge and Holborn Viaduct, but she came from Windsor only for the day.

The queen occasionally sought at this period a new form of relaxation in intercourse with some of the men of lettes whose fame contributed to the glory of her reign. Her personal interval in literature was not strong, and it diminished in her later years ; but she respected its producers and their influence. With Tennyson, whose work her husband had admired, and whose 'In Memoriam' gave her much comfort in her grief, she was already in intimate correspondence, which she maintained till his death ; and when he visited her at Windsor and Osborne she treated him with the utmost confidence. Through her friends, Sir Arthur Helps and Dean Stanley, she had come to hear much of other great living writers. Lady Augusta Stanley told her of Carlyle, and she sent him a message of condolence on the sudden death of his wife in 1866. In May 1869 the queen visited the Westminster deanery mainly to make Carlyle's personal acquaintance. The Stanleys' guests also included Mr. and Mrs. Grote, Sir Charles and Lady Lyell, and the poet Browning. The queen was in a most gracious humour. Carlyle deemed it 'impossible to imagine a politer little woman; nothing the least imperious ; all gentle, all sincere. . . makes you feel too (if you have any sense in you) that she is queen' (, Carlyle in London, ii. 379-80). She told Browning that she admired his wife's poetry (, Lord Houffhton, ii. 200). Among the novels she had lately read was George Eliot's 'Mill on the Floss,' but Dickens's work was the only fiction of the day that really attracted her. In him, too, she manifested personal interest. She had attended in 1857 a performance by himself and other amateurs of Wilkie Collins's 'The Frozen Deep' at the Gallery of Illustration, and some proposals, which came to nothing, had been made to him to read the 'Christmas Carol' at court in 1858. At the sale of Thackeray's property in 1864 she purchased for 25l. 10s. the copy of the 'Christmas Carol' which Dickens had presented to Thackeray. In March 1870 Dickens, at Helps's request, lent her some photographs of scenes in the American civil war, and she took the opportunity that she had long sought of making his personal acquaintance. She summoned him to Buckingham Palace in order to thank him for his courtesy. On his departure she asked him to present her with copies of his writings, and handed him a copy of her 'Leaves with the autograph inscription, 'From the humblest of writers to one of the greatest Other writers of whom she thought highly included Dr. Samuel Smiles, whose 'Lives of the Engineers' she presented to her son-