Chapter XVI.
Domestic Life After 1861.
After the death of the Prince Consort the available materials for a life of Her Majesty are much less ample. It is true that in giving directions to Sir Theodore Martin for writing the Life of the Prince, Her Majesty's desire was that only so much of her own life was to be revealed as was absolutely necessary for the continuity of the story; but the two lives were so completely one that it was impossible to write an account of one that was not almost equally an account of the other. The realized, as long as the Prince lived, the dream of Tennyson's "Princess":
"Everywhere
Two heads in council, two beside the hearth,
Two in the tangled business of the world,
Two in the liberal offices of life."
Sources of information from political memoirs and biographies also became rarer, till they disappear altogether as we approach recent years. The burning political questions of the present day cannot be handled as those can that have been cooling for nearly half-a-century. Her Majesty's published diaries and the Memoir of Princess Alice studiously exclude nearly all references to the multifarious and constant political duties and interests devolving on the Head of the State; it is only every now and then and, as it were, accidentally, that Her Majesty's political activities, during the thirty-four years since her husband's death, have been made known to the mass of her subjects; whereas, during the twenty-one years of her married
