Page:Dictionary of National Biography. Sup. Vol III (1901).djvu/511

 and was never at a loss for recreation. Round games of cards or whist she exchanged in later years for patience; but she sketched, played the piano, sang, did needlework until old age.

The queen's artistic sense was not strong. In furniture and dress she preferred the fashions of her early married years to any other. She was never a judge of painting, and she bestowed her main patronage on portrait painters like Winterhalter and Von Angeli, and on sculptors like Boehm, who had little beyond their German nationality to recommend them. 'The only studio of a master that she ever visited was that of Leighton, whose "Procession of Cimabue" the prince consort had bought for her, and whom she thought delightful, though perhaps more as an accomplished and highly agreeable courtier than as a painter.' In music she showed greater taste. Staunch to the heroes of her youth, she always appreciated the operas of Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti, but Handel and Mendelssohn also won her early admiration, and Gounod and Sullivan fascinated her later. She never understood or approved Wagner or his school. She was devoted to the theatre from girlhood, and all her enthusiasm revived when in her last years she restored the dramatic performances at court, which her mourning had long interrupted. She was not well read, and although she emulated her husband's respect for literature, it entered little into the business or recreation of her life.

In talk she appreciated homely wit of a quiet kind, and laughed without restraint when a jest or anecdote appealed to her. Subtlety or indelicacy offended her, and sometimes evoked a scornful censure. Although she naturally expected courtesy of address, and resented brusque expression of contradiction or dissent, she was not conciliated by obsequiousness. 'It is useless to ask ——'s opinion,' she would say; 'he only tries to echo mine.' Her own conversation had often the charm of naïveté. When told that a very involved piece of modern German music, to which she was listening with impatience, was a 'drinking song' by Rubinstein, she remarked, 'Why, you could not drink a cup of tea to that.' Her memory was unusually sound, and errors which were made in her hearing on matters familiar to her she corrected with briskness and point.

The queen's religion was simple, sincere, and undogmatic. Theology did not interest her, but in the virtue of religious toleration she was an ardent believer. When Dr. Creighton, the last bishop of London of her reign, declared that she was the best liberal he knew, he had in mind her breadth of religious sentiment. On moral questions her views were strict. She was opposed to the marriage of widows. To the movement for the greater emancipation of women she was thoroughly and almost blindly antipathetic. She never realised that her own position gave the advocates of women's rights their strongest argument. With a like inconsistency she regarded the greatest of her female predecessors, Queen Elizabeth, with aversion, although she resembled Queen Elizabeth in her frankness and tenacity of purpose, and might, had the constitution of the country in the nineteenth century permitted it, have played as decisive a part in history. Queen Victoria's sympathies were with the Stuarts and the Jacobites. She declined to identify Prince Charles Edward with his popular designation of 'the Young Pretender,' and gave in his memory the baptismal names of Charles Edward to her grandson, the Duke of Albany. She was deeply interested in the history of Mary Stuart; she placed a window in Carisbrooke Church in memory of Charles I's daughter Elizabeth (1850), and a marble tomb by Marochetti above her grave in the neighbouring church of St. Thomas at Newport (1856). She restored James II's tomb at St. Germain. Such likes and dislikes reflected purely personal idiosyncrasies. It was not Queen Elizabeth's mode of rule that offended Queen Victoria; it was her lack of feminine modesty. It was not the Stuarts' method of government that appealed to her; it was their fall from high estate to manifold misfortune. Queen Victoria's whole life and action were, indeed, guided by personal sentiment rather than by reasoned principles. But her personal sentiment, if not altogether removed from the commonplace, nor proof against occasional inconsistencies, bore ample trace of courage, truthfulness sympathy with suffering. Far from being an embodiment of selfish whim, the queen's personal sentiment blended in its mam current sincere love of public justice with staunch fidelity to domestic duty, and ripe experience came in course of years to imbue it with the force of patriarchal wisdom. In her capacity alike of monarch and woman, the queen's personal sentiment proved, on the whole, a safer guide than the best devised system of moral or political philosophy.

VIII

Of her nine children (four sons—Albert Edward, prince of Wales, Alfred, Arthur, and Leopold—and five daughters—Victoria,