good, some bad, some utterly worthless, are thrown together without method and without selection. All sorts of petty details, in themselves of the most insignificant kind and valueless as illustrative of character, are gone into, often at intolerable length. Things are not unfrequently divulged, which might make the miserable subject of the narrative turn in his grave with horror. His weaknesses, the mere accidents, it may be, of broken health, are recklessly laid bare, and the dearest secrets of his heart turned into a theme for vulgar gossip. To drag his frailties from their dread abode,' would seem to be the main object in view; and they who should protect the man, whose life they have set themselves to manufacture into a book, do him as much mischief by their inconsiderate babble, or clumsy vindications, as the malevolent cynic does to the man and woman he has happened to know, who leaves behind him, as a legacy to mankind, a journal of the vilest gossip of his fellow cynics, which he dared not publish in his own lifetime, to be published after his death as materials for history.'

Happily a swift oblivion inevitably overtakes biographies into which so little conscientious study and artistic skill have gone. Charles Lamb, fortunately for himself, had sunk into his grave before some of the chief offenders in this line had thrust their chaotic octavos upon the world, otherwise these would, to a certainty, have been included with Court Circulars, Statistical Reports, Beattie's and Soame Jenyns's works, and the like, in that famous catalogue of his books, which are no books.' It is with a very different order of book that we are now called upon to deal. In the Life of the Prince Consort' by Mr. Theodore Martin, we have a book which is a book—a book fitted to be as welcome in the drawing-room as in the library, and which Charles Lamb would certainly not have included in his catalogue of biblia a-biblia, for he would have been sure to have been delighted, not less with the delicate insight into character which it affords, than with the thoroughly artistic skill which has gone to its production.

Mr. Martin's task was one of supreme difficulty. The events in which the Prince played an important, though often unnoticed part, were still recent; the passions of old party strife had not as vet wholly cooled down; men were still alive of whom it was difficult not to speak, but who could not fail to be deeply sensitive about whatever was said in any work which appeared with Her Majesty's sanction. Much had to be set right, as to which the public were either inaccurately informed or wholly in the dark. To write a life of the Prince, which did not deal fully with public affairs both at home and abroad, which did not

grapple

grapple with the motum civicum, gravesque principum amicitias, which are at all times a theme of peril, would have been to write a life from which what constituted its main elements of interest was omitted. Yet how might a writer hope to hold the scales so evenly as not to give offence, or, what in such a work was to be still more deprecated, provoke controversy in which possibly the Sovereign might be involved?

Then Mr. Martin, as he tells us, 'had not the happiness or the good fortune to know the Prince personally,' and he had therefore to enter upon his task in total uncertainty whether he should be enabled by the information to be placed at his disposal to overcome this disadvantage, or to satisfy his instinct as a writer of experience, that nothing was withheld, which 'an honest chronicler' ought to know.

From the latter difficulty Mr. Martin assures us he was at once relieved by the generous unreserve with which Her Majesty placed every species of information at his disposal-an unreserve which this volume enables us to estimate in all its extent, while it shows at the same time, by the prevailing discretion and good taste with which Mr. Martin has used his materials, how fully the confidence has been repaid. One thing at least is evident, from what Mr. Martin has written, that the relation which has subsisted between himself and his Sovereign, with reference to this work, has been one of entire frankness on one side, and of unconstrained independence on the other. Mr. Martin has obviously not been asked to withhold the frankest expression of the convictions at which he has arrived from the facts and documents before him; and he has not hesitated to speak out with the fearless loyalty of a man who felt sure of a generous estimate from a Sovereign whose truthfulness and directness of character are no secret to her people.

With such materials as have obviously been placed in Mr. Martin's hands he was well qualified to deal. The pages of this Review have, on more occasions than one, contained evidences of his power to place eminent men of a past day before us in their habits as they lived.' And his admirable Monograph on Horace had satisfied the most fastidious that his knowledge of men and things, and his quick spirit of imaginative sympathy, were likely to bring vividly before us the salient points of the history of the days in which the Prince's lot was cast, and to show the Prince himself moving and working among them with all the animation of a living picture. Nor have the expectations of those who were familiar with Mr. Martin's powers as a writer been disappointed. Even from this. first volume the world will be enabled to know the Prince as he

has

has not been known before. When the work is complete, and the Prince, who in these pages is seen rather growing into the great man, than developed into the noble proportions which his character afterwards assumed, we may hope to possess a record not unworthy of one to whom, as Mr. Martin well says, England has assigned a foremost place among those whom she delights to hold in reverent remembrance.'

Fascinating as the work is, its success must not be altogether attributed to the merits of the writer, admirably although, to our judgment, he has executed his task. In this instance the Life is that of a person placed in a most singular and difficult position: always before the public, liable every day of his life to do something, or to say something, which might provoke censure or evoke applause; and, on that account alone, it becomes a Life of exceeding interest. Moreover, the character of the hero was fully as singular as the position he occupied. Perhaps the most remarkable point in that character, which is clearly discerned and well brought out by the biographer, is the interest, and that not of a superficial kind, which the Prince took in everything that went on around him in the world. Mr. Martin is thus justly entitled to say:

Quicquid agunt homines, votum, timor, ira, voluptas
Gaudia, discursus, nostri est farrago libelli.'

But it was not only the passions and affections of the men of his time that engaged the active mind of the Prince Consort. He took as deep an interest in the artistic, and literary, and scientific world, as in the political in which he bore so prominent a part. Nor was his interest bounded by any particular form of culture. An excellent judge of painting and of sculpture, he was also equally delighted with, and equally skilled in appreciating architecture and gardening. We particularly notice gardening, because the Prince has left behind him proofs of his great skill in that art in which, as his biographer notices, he took as much delight as did Lord Bacon. His love for it is well expressed in the following passage in one of his letters to the Princess Imperial of Prussia, 13th April, 1859.

'We have an art, however, in which even this third element of creation-inward force and growth-is present, and which has, therefore, had extraordinary attractions for me of late years, indeed I may say from earliest childhood, viz., the art of gardening. In this the artist who lays out the work, and devises a garment for a piece of ground, has the delight of seeing his work live and grow hour by hour; and, while it is growing, he is able to polish, to cut and carve, to fill up here and there, to hope, and to love.'

Then,

Then, too, there was probably no man of his time who was so thoroughly versed in all the improvements in manufacture that abound in this improving age. All those persons who had the good fortune to be brought into close converse with the Prince, will recollect with what animation, with what fidelity, and with what clearness he was wont to describe any new development of manufacture which he had recently seen. He excelled in

statement, using no unnecessary words, and taking every division of his statement in its own order. We have often thought how it would have delighted the inventor, or the adopter of some improvement in manufactures, to hear how fully and how admirably the Prince described its peculiar merits, and the new work it was to do.

It has frequently been a subject for anxious thought with biographers, whether they should give a summary of the character of their heroes at the beginning of the work, or at the ending; or whether they should leave this summary to be formed by the reader for himself. We prefer, not having that space at our command which the biographer possesses, to give our view of the Prince's character before entering in detail into the many subjects of private and political import with which the book abounds.

One of the principal characteristics we have already noticed, namely, his interest in all human affairs, and we might have added, his exceeding desire for the highest self-culture. Such a Prince would have greatly delighted Goethe. But, joined with this exceeding desire for self-culture, he had what Goethe's critics, somewhat unjustly as we think, are wont to maintain that Goethe had not: namely, a deep interest in other men's proceedings, and in the general welfare of the world. It was impossible, however, for the Prince, with his affectionate nature, to be otherwise than very sympathetic. How strong and deep were his affections, may be discerned, not only in his domestic relations, but also in his general converse with the world, and in his great anxiety to diminish suffering of all kinds. Besides it is evident, from the records in this book, that the Prince's sense of duty was very strong, and that no man was more aware of the benefit that might be effected by a person in his position furthering everything that was likely to produce good for the world in art, science, literature, or manufactures. We have sometimes thought what would have been his career if he had been born to occupy a very different position. He would then, we feel almost certain, have devoted himself chiefly to one pursuit, and would have become pre-eminent in that. This, however, is not the business of a Prince. He can do more good

by

by exercising the receptive faculty, and so being able to promote and encourage special excellence in others, than by any amount of culture, exercised in one direction.

But to proceed with the character, which may be summed up shortly. The Prince was an amiable, loving, affectionate man, possessing a high order of intelligence. He was penetrated by a sense of duty, such a sense of duty as was always to be seen in the great Duke of Wellington. He was very reticent himself, and very anxious that others should be reticent also. In a letter cited by Mr. Martin, which he wrote to his eldest daughter (21st of March, 1860), in reference to a very distorted report of some remarks of his own in a letter by the great Humboldt to Varnhagen von Ense, he says:

'The matter is really of no moment, for what does not one write or say to his intimate friends under the impulse of the moment? But the publication is a great indiscretion. How many deadly enemies may be made if publicity be given to what one man has said of another, or perhaps even in many cases has not said?'

He was a very humorous man, and exceedingly prone to mark whatever was droll and comical that came before him, but always with exceeding good nature. This was a part of his character which was probably least known to the British public, and which would have more endeared him to them if they had known it.

He was a deeply religious man, with a pure horror of bigotry of any kind; and we should say, that he had always a dread lest theological questions of a minor kind should divert ingenious and learned men from devoting themselves to what he considered to be the essentials of all practical religious convictions, and their bearing on the truest and the best interests of mankind.

In the volume before us Mr. Martin has most judiciously avoided a common fault of biographers by not dwelling too long upon the early years of the Prince Consort. One boy is very much like another that is, apparently so, for children, especially children whom the world are likely afterwards to care about, are very reticent, and do not by any means tell their elders all that is going on in their young minds. There are, however, certain peculiarities, even in these early years of the Prince, which deserve notice. These are well shown in a letter of Count Mensdorf to the Queen :

'Albert, as a child, was of a mild, benevolent disposition. It was only what he thought unjust or dishonest that could make him angry. Thus I recollect one day when we children, Albert, Ernest, Ferdinand, Augustus, Alexander, myself, and a few other boys (if I am not mistaken, Paul Wangenheim was one) were playing at the Rosenau, and

some