I hope, at all
events, she drank it with reverence. Why, when that old wine was bottled,
Her Majesty's grandfather lacked some twenty years of being born, and the
American Colonies were as loyal as London;--then the trunk of the royal
old Bourbon tree, whose last branch death lopped away but yesterday at
Frohsdorf, seemed solid enough, though rotten at the core; and, the great
French Revolution was undreamed of, except in the seething brain of some
wild political theorist, or in some poor peasant's nightmare of
starvation. When that old wine was bottled, Temple Bar, under the
garlanded arch of which Her Majesty had just passed so smilingly, was
often adorned with gory heads of traitors, and long after that old wine
was bottled, men and women could be seen of a Friday, dangling from the
front of Newgate prison, and swinging in the morning air, like so many
ghastly pendulums.
This year 1837, Victoria spent her first Christmas as a Queen at Windsor,
right royally I doubt not, and I think it probable she received a few
presents. A few days before, she had gone in state to Parliament, to give
her assent to the New Civil List Act-not a hard duty for her to perform,
it would seem, as that act settled on her for life an annual income of
L385,000.
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