life and interest no more than its iron and steel, or, perhaps, counting human interest in the longrun more important than the trifling sacrifices of to-day, never winced. And year by year this great Servant of the Queen has gone farther and farther, trampling and churning the stillest seas, marking out the most obscure seapaths, triumphing silently and steadily over every difficulty; and making our exiled children scarcely farther off from us than they would have been in the distant corners of the island when the reign began. The children of the Victorian age, now the mature men and women who carry on its business, have never known the other state of affairs. They cannot look back upon a time when the sea was silent, and no smoke on the horizon betrayed the quick-coming messenger, the punctual post, the ready service. The great Slave has been born in our household, like Abraham's steward: his feats are too familiar to cause us any surprise we confide our best to him without a fear of his fidelity. No Frankenstein, though fancy may still play with that thought and laugh at itself for the whim; but the chief servant in our father's house, the strongest and surest messenger of the Queen.

At home, the same patient Vassal, not standing upon his dignity, goes our errands night and day, stands and spins webs enough to cover the earth, beats out ever new creatures of his own kind, multiplying his race for almost every practical purpose under the sun. In 1837 the steadiest mind still doubted whether a cow astray on his lines might not wreck his going, and declared it as easy to ride to the skies on a rocket as to cross the country at the rate of twenty miles an hour. We believe

there were great searchings of heart when the young Queen first set foot at Slough on the train that was to carry her from Windsor to London. Now she confides herself, and is confided cheerfully by us, which is more to the purpose, in one which sweeps across the Continent, and sleeps as if in her bed at home, while her Servant carries her lightly towards the sunshine and the flowers.

But there is another magic henchman holding the other side of the gate of life, a being more mysterious still, invisible, inhabiting a thread, a wire not so thick as your finger. It is curious to know that this second Gnome or Afreet waited for the just moment to have its first patent made out in the name of Victoria-triumphant and symbolical name, expressive of all the victories. It had been playing about the surface of the world in dazzling yet capricious glances, but rose and put itself in kindly fetters instantly, to obey the mandates of the young Queen. At first we were shy of this strange, silent, invisible Slave, and only ventured to employ him upon solemn messages, making him rather the messenger of death than of life, feeling it a sort of profanation to charge him lightly with words of little meaning, or acknowledge him as the cheerful servant of the house. When telegrams began first to fly about the world, simple folk regarded them with terror, feeling that internal conviction, which is so near to every one of us, that sorrow and trouble were the most likely things to arrive upon us thus suddenly out of the unknown. But there are few who are fluttered out of their composure now by any such familiar reason. This wonderful Agent is at once more and less impressive than his brother Genius

of Steam. His spiritual part, the swiftness, the silence, the invisibility, thrill the mind when we find ourselves by his means almost touching the hand of a friend thousands of miles away; but the tools by which he reveals himself are singularly unimpressive, and possess nothing of the tremendous material being which awes and overwhelms the mind when we see a great engine clanging, and plunging, and whirling his wheels through the daylight. It is said that the wires were twice removed from the side of the first enterprising line that set them up, because they were so ugly! Think of that among all the contented ugliness of the early Victorian age! There is more possibility of being fanciful about them now, when they stretch like a blank score of music across the sky everywhere, shrilling by times an Eolian note of their own, waiting for the music to be breathed into them, and in the meantime playing with the little birds who find a momentary repose, a sort of rest-andbe-thankful perch, high amid the airs of heaven! Now there are all sorts of whimsical and cheerful associations gathering about them. We hear sometimes of an expected birth, by a freak of time and space, before it has occurred, so to speak, and drink the health of the new born by a clock which has not yet sounded his birth - hour on the other side of the world!

We feel half ashamed of ourselves for proclaiming these wonders. Is not this the sphere of the penny-a-liner, who daily to the listening earth proclaims the story of these triumphs, with much shedding of adjectives? It is very well to laugh at the penny-a-liner, but what can the soberest narrator do but shed adjectives also, when he has to record the wonders of a

reign which has brought forth so many? When the Queen came to the throne the world was wrapt in perennial silence, as when Columbus sailed into the unknown. Now it thrills with sound around all the spheres, and in the twinkling of an eye your friend's voice comes back, in keen or kind response, from the end of the world. Is not this something to rave about? When we were young- But you cry out, Oh, no more, please, about the Electric Telegraph; don't we know everything that can be said on that subject? It puts a girdle round the earth, &c. It brings news of the son to the mother, the husband to the wife; also of the precise moment to sell out your shares at an advantage; please, no more of it! And we submit: we are of that opinion, too, in ordinary circumstances. Can anything be so vulgar and ugly, filling the air above us and the earth beneath us with its odious wires: how careless the little clerks are at the side offices, too much taken up by their gossip to attend to you: what a bore it is to be pelted with yellow envelopes by all sort of insignificant people, explaining how they cannot dine with you (as if you ever wanted them, save for civility!), or how sorry they were not to see you when you called (a circumstance for which you yourselves gave thanks to Providence). Well! we leave this second Afreet to commend himself, as he does in almost every new combination of circumstances, to everybody's business and bosom. It would be a dark day for us all were we to be deprived of the aid of this Servant of the Queen.

Other "easements," like those which Jeanie Deans recorded gratefully on her long and terrible journey into England, have come to us along with the greater aids

of science. Jeanie Deans's journey is made in some hours now, and without any expenditure of personal energy, a trifling matter not to be thought of. We have often thought, however, that among the grievances which the French think they have against us, the practical subtraction from them of

one of the greatest works of modern times, which was not our work, is a very real grievance indeed. We did not make the Suez Canal, we would not even join in making it. We laughed at it, wonderful to relate, taking our cue from a powerful but flippant Minister; and when that nation flew to work with an amount of feeling and enthusiasm which we seldom manifest, we continued to jeer like Lord Palmerston: until there came a moment when the jeer dropped, or was turned upon ourselves. They made that great work: but it is we who have the advantage, and have got the control into our own hands. If France dislikes this, we can only say she has very good reason, and that it is natural she should. It may be partially her own fault, nevertheless it is apparent that it was a very fortunate thing for us. The next generation, at least the uninstructed part of it, will probably refuse to believe that it was French science and enterprise which dug that dull ditch with its yellow sides out of the sand, and made things so convenient for us as we come and go to our Indian possessions. Perhaps-let us flatter ourselves, that at least it was we who showed them the way. For before de Lesseps had stirred, or the first sod was cut, we had already begun to land at Alexandria and rattle across the desert in the most wretched of pseudo-railways, doing after a clumsier and easier method

what the French did more effectually by the permanent waterway. Our route was called the Overland Route, with much pretension and discomfort; and it was the first attempt to shorten the long voyage, or bring India within closer reach. Our eastern possessions up to that time were scarcely nearer to us than when John Company first set foot upon their shores.

This wonderful change has altered our relations in many ways with our great dependency, gradually making the conditions of intercourse so different and so much easier than of old, that Britain has an additional chance of coming to understand India, and India to know more or less what Britain means—a still more difficult matter. Going to India, once almost the sacrifice of a life, for many of the men in former days who filled the Services were twenty, thirty years in unbroken exile,-has now become a pleasure-trip for the wealthy, a possibility for all. A young civilian or officer no longer hesitates to use his three months' leave in a visit home-six weeks at home being, he feels, "good enough," with all its reopenings of kindness and refreshings of mind, for the expenditure required. How the old nabobs would have stared at the rush home for six weeks of their young successors! There are no nabobs now the life of the West flows freely to the Orient; that of the East, if not so freely, yet with a fulness extraordinary among those races, tends towards the West, prejudice and terror of the black water, and the inevitable (but temporary) loss of caste notwithstanding.

This, however, is not the only change in India since the Queen's

accession. It was the country of the Company when her Majesty began to reign. The soldiers then were the Company's soldiers, and so were the statesmen, the administrators, the actual rulers. The most exciting period of her his tory, so far at least as our connection with her is concerned, has passed in the Victorian age. The most vigorous effort ever made in the East to shake off British rule was made in 1857 in the Mutiny. It was then that we discovered in Great Britain how close to our pride, our interest, and our heart was the sway of India. No war perhaps ever moved a people so completely, who were themselves out of reach of its atrocities. There was no sacrifice that could have been made, which would have been regarded at home, and by the people, as too much to preserve and recover the great continent which had rebelled against our sway, and to punish those who had insulted the sovereignty of England. The fury was almost individual throughout the length and breadth of the land. When the struggle was finally over and the rebel subdued, the Company had to give place to the Imperial Government, and henceforward there was no authority in India but that of the Queen. The difference was little, in practical matters, but we have been told that the subtle Indian mind found a consolation in its defeat, from the fact that, though the Queen was victorious, the rebel also had a kind of victory in the downfall of the Company. He accepted it as success, and was rather elated than humbled by the fact that the foot which now held him down was a royal foot, and that though the great Queen of the West had triumphed over him and all his ways, yet the

Company had fallen, a tribute to the righteousness of his cause. Whether the Indian loves the British rule better in consequence is a subject on which very few can speak with any authority. That great assembly of nations is a wonder and mystery to all. What goes on over its vast surface, amid all its courts and seats of antique learning, in its temples and mosques, in the villages which we do not know, and the bazaars which we do not understand, who shall say? But the Indian princes, who are gradually acquiring the habit of presenting themselves at her Majesty's Court, and the native. soldiers who will swell the Queen's pageant in June, and who are also acquiring the habit of fighting for her flag in various regions of the earth, may do much towards mutual understanding,-unless they should make the misunderstanding deeper, which also is possible too. dia the unchangeable has changed under the Queen's reign as perhaps never before. The East has learned to come to the Westthe West has sent trade, manufactures, crowds of visitors. A certain unity seems to have grown up between the kingdoms which acknowledge the same sovereign. But how far this is to be trusted no man knows.

In

Beside all these fundamental changes, two great principalities or kingdoms have been added to the empire in India-the Punjab, with its manly races and moderate climate; the mysterious empire of Burmah, rich in barbaric pearl and gold-enough territory and wealth to make a puissant monarch in their own ground alone, but scarcely noted in the vast extent of British possessions.

A kinder circle nearer to our hearts, more comprehensible to our

intelligence, of our own race, and sharing all our methods of thought, is formed by the Colonies which go round the world and trace the boundaries of empire, always carrying with them the English tongue and name. Our Colonies are no mushrooms, springing up in a night, no seedlings struggling into artificial being, but well assured, and deeply planted, adopting the Antipodes as if they were its native children, and adding many a blossom of the wilds triumphantly, as if by nature, to the oaken fabric of their native growth. All through this age the influences which form nations have been at work without a pause, persistent, unwearying, with results that sound like the telling of a fairy tale. That great Australia, which is now so teeming with life, so rich in flocks and herds, so busy in all the crafts and arts, possessed, when the reign began, little more than a fringe of settlements round the coast, and even these apparently doomed from their beginning, being built, as some reckless constructors of cheap houses build, upon the foulest dust-heap, a mass of human débris, worse than the uncleanest rinsings of road and stable.

A

mass of convicts discharged out of English prisons, to ease the responsibilities of the home country at the cost of ruining the new, seems to us now an extraordinary foundation on which to plant an honest race or build solid institutions: but fortunately the mistake became apparent before it went too far. In these sixty years Australia has wiped out all trace of its convict settlements, and become one of the most rich and prosperous communities in the world, if community that can be called which is made up of so many states, each a great principality in itself, larger than a French province in former

days, or a German independent duchy. Each, indeed, is a country in itself, with its own Rulers and laws, though all in faithfullest adherence to the Mother country, and Her who represents that Mother with a force and meaning greater perhaps than any other symbolism existing-being in herself the natural Mother to whom that entire world may be said to have been born; for Australia has no happy memory that goes beyond the Queen.

All her prosperities, the great facts of her existence, belong to and have been developed by the great Victorian age. The visitors from that newest of new worlds (though the scientific people say it is so antiquated a world, with its oldfashioned beasts who have survived nowhere else) who are coming to grace the Queen's commemoration are as a class the most wonderful, the most whimsical group that ever monarch invited. They are not nobles and chiefs as in the old world, nor sheep-farmers nor golddiggers, nor the aristocracy of merchants, shipowners, and suchlike, as in a perfectly new community they might be. They are Prime Ministers! Imagine a modern sovereign who is able to invite a dozen first officers of State, Premiers of Cabinets and Parliaments-all ruling in her name, putting forth proclamations, making laws which will be known in the courts as 1000th Victoria, and which run under the title of our gracious Sovereign lady the Queen -to her great celebration! When you think of it, so simple as it is, expressed in the soberest everyday words, it is the most memorable invitation, worthy of a Cyrus or an Alexander. All the Prime Ministers! all the Satraps, Tetrarchs, Princes-Palatine, subject kings! It is like great Rome at