LETTER TO THE QUEEN

ON COMPLETING THE

VOLUME FOR PRIVATE CIRCULATION.

MADAM,-I have now the honor to submit to your Majesty the various Letters and Memoranda intrusted to me by your Majesty, as, in obedience to your Majesty's commands, I have arranged and connected them to the best of my ability.

I am well aware how far my execution of the work falls short of what your Majesty had a right to expect, of what I myself could have wished, and of what the subject demands. It is, however, a satisfaction to me to feel that no failure on my part in the performance of the portion of the task allotted to me can detract from the simple. beauty of many of the letters that will be found in the following pages, or from the interest in the picture of a happy domestic life, as drawn in your Majesty's own Memoranda.

As I believe your Majesty intends to limit the circulation of this volume to your Majesty's own children and family, or, if it goes beyond them, to a very small circle of personal friends, I have not thought it necessary to omit any of the very interesting and private details con

tained in your Majesty's Memoranda, or to withhold the touching expression of your Majesty's feelings, as given in your Majesty's own words. Some of these details, particularly those relating to your Majesty's marriage, it might seem unusual to include in a work intended for more general perusal, though even in that case, judging of others' feeling by my own, I can not doubt that they would meet with the warmest and most heartfelt sympathy.

The translations of the Prince's letters, as they appear in the text, are for the most part, and with a few merely verbal corrections, by Princess Helena. They are made, as it appears to me, with surprising fidelity; but the originals of most of them will be found in an Appendix, for the benefit of those who may wish to read them in the language in which they were written.

The present volume closes with the end of the first year of your Majesty's married life. The farther prosecution of the work will be a matter of greater difficulty.

From the Prince's constantly increasing connection with the political events of the day (so many of the principal actors in which are still living), it will be impossible to do full justice to his character without a reference to those events, and to the influence which he brought to bear upon them. Moreover, the Prince's occupations were so varied and multifarious-he gave himself with such energy and persevering activity to whatever could benefit his fellow-man, that to follow him, even through one branch of his useful and unintermitted labors for the good of his adopted country, would afford ample work to a single pen.

The early days, however, to which this volume relates, speak the promise so nobly realized of his future years.

I have felt it to be a great privilege to have been allowed to assist in your Majesty's work of love; and it will be a source of lasting gratification to me if the result shall be to make more generally known-at least as far as the limited circulation which your Majesty intends for this volume shall allow-the virtues and great qualities of one to whom I was bound by the strongest ties of gratitude and affection.

I remain, with the most heartfelt devotion, your Majesty's very humble and obedient subject and servant, C. GREY.

Windsor Castle, March, 1866.

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS.

ALBERT-using only the name by which he was known and endeared to the British people-second son of ERNEST I., Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, and husband of our beloved Queen, was lineally descended from those great Saxon princes whose names are immortalized in European history by the stand they made in defense of their country's liberties against the encroaching power of the German Emperors, as well as by the leading part they took in the struggle for the emancipation of the human mind from the trammels of Romish bigotry and superstition.

The names of Frederick the Warlike, first Prince Elector of Saxony; of Frederick the Wise, the friend and protector of Luther; and of John Frederick the Magnanimous, selected from a long list of rulers scarcely inferior to them in fame, sufficiently attest the by-gone glories of the race.

But to none of those great ancestors can the present descendants of that illustrious house turn with more just pride than to him whose loss the world finds every day

more cause to mourn.

If goodness and virtue are inseparable from true greatness, where shall we find in history a more perfect combination of all the qualities that make a man truly great?