"
I shall not even treat of the great wars which stormed over the
Continent, and upset and set up thrones, except as they affected the life
of my illustrious subject. At first they seemed to form a lurid
background to the bright pictures of peace and love presented by her
happy marriage and maternity, and afterwards in the desolation and
mourning they brought, seemed in keeping with the sorrow of her
widowhood.
Happily all was quiet and peace in the United Kingdom, and in the world
at large, when the honeymoon began for that august but simple-hearted
pair of lovers, Victoria and Albert; or, as she would have preferred to
write it, Albert and Victoria. The fiery little spurt of revolt in
Canada, called rather ambitiously, "The Canadian Rebellion," had ended in
smoke, and the outburst of Chartism, from the spontaneous combustion of
sullen and long-smothered discontent among the working classes, had been
extinguished, partly by a fog of misapprehension and misdirection, partly
by a process of energetic stamping out. The shameful Chinese opium war,
the Cabul disasters, and the fearful Sepoy rebellion were, as yet, only
slow, simmering horrors in the black caldron of the Fates. Irish
starvation had not set in, in its acute form, and Irish sedition was, as
yet, taking only the form of words--the bold, eloquent, magnificent, but
not malignant and scarcely menacing words of Daniel O'Connell In the
Infernal Council Chamber below, the clock whose hours are epochs of
crime, had not yet struck for the era of political assassination.
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