Page:Life of Her Majesty Queen Victoria (IA lifeofhermajesty01fawc).pdf/218

 that followed the Royal pair wheresoever they went, there are constant references to the failing health of the Prince Consort; his digestion was a perpetual trouble; the Queen kept back details of business from him if they were of an anxious nature, because she knew they irritated his delicate stomach. The death of the Duchess of Kent threw a good deal of extra work upon the Prince; he was left her sole executor, and masses of papers had to be dealt with without the aid of her secretary and controller of the household, who had predeceased his mistress by a few weeks. There was a visible failure of health and energy on the part of the Prince. "I have been far from well of late;" "my catarrh refuses to give way;" "yesterday I was too miserable to hold the pen," are a few expressions taken at random from his private letters in the year preceding his death. He did not, however, relax his habit of diligent work. Summer and winter he rose at seven, and immediately attacked his correspondence, and the reading and writing of despatches for the Queen. They worked together, he writing, she correcting and amending. He would bring letters to the Queen and say, "Read carefully, and tell me if there be any faults in these" (he was never quite secure, it seems, about his English); or, "Here is a draft I have made for you. Read it; I should think it would do." The last time he rose to work in the early morning in this was was on December 1, 1861, when he prepared a draft for the Queen on the Trent affair. Sir Theodore Martin gives it in facsimile in his fifth volume of the Life of the Prince. It stands in the Prince's writing, with the Queen's corrections. As he gave it to the Queen he said, "I am so weak I have scarcely been able to hold the pen." It was a worthy piece of work to stand as a last memento of a noble life. It was the time of the