On that sad Christmas which followed the prince's death the usual
festivities were omitted in the royal household, and the nation mourned in
unison with the Queen for the great and good departed.
It has been well said by a distinguished writer that it was only 'since
his death, and chiefly since the Queen's own generous and tender impulse
prompted her to make the nation the confidant of her own great love and
happiness, that the Prince-Consort has had full justice.... Perhaps, if
truth were told, he was too uniformly noble, too high above all soil and
fault, to win the fickle popular admiration, which is more caught by
picturesque irregularity than by the higher perfections of a wholly worthy
life.'
CHAPTER VIII.
The Queen in Mourning--Death of Princess Alice--Illness of Prince of
Wales--The Family of the Queen--Opening of Indian Exhibition and Imperial
Institute--Jubilee--Jubilee Statue--Death of Duke of Clarence--Address to
the Nation on the marriage of Princess May.
Henceforth the great Queen was 'written widow,' and while striving nobly
in her loneliness to fulfil those public functions, in which she had
hitherto been so faithfully companioned, she shrank at first from courtly
pageantry and from the gay whirl of London life, and lived chiefly in the
quiet homes which she had always loved best, at Osborne and Balmoral.
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