But a truce to this idle jesting on exalted themes—­too palpably the utterance of social envy and mortified ambition.  “They are our superiors, and that’s the fact,” as Thackeray exclaims in his chapter on the Whigs.  “I am not a Whig myself; but, oh, how I should like to be one!” In a similar spirit of compunctious self-abasement, the present writer may exclaim, “I have not myself been included in the list of Birthday Honours,—­but, oh, how I should like to be there!”

FOOTNOTES: 

[23] 1897.

[24] Since this passage was written, a return has been made to the earlier practice, and an Irish peerage has been created—­the first since 1868.

XXI.

THE QUEEN’S ACCESSION.

The writer of these chapters would not willingly fall behind his countrymen in the loyal sentiments and picturesque memories proper to the “high mid-summer pomps” which begin to-morrow.[25] But there is an almost insuperable difficulty in finding anything to write which shall be at once new and true; and this chapter must therefore consist mainly of extracts.  As the sun of August brings out wasps, so the genial influence of the Jubilee has produced an incredible abundance of fibs, myths, and fables.  They have for their subject the early days of our Gracious Sovereign, and round that central theme they play with every variety of picturesque inventiveness.  Nor has invention alone been at work.  Research has been equally busy.  Miss Wynn’s description, admirable in its simplicity, of the manner in which the girl queen received the news of her accession was given to the world by Abraham Hayward in Diaries of a Lady of Quality a generation ago.  Within the last month it must have done duty a hundred times.

Scarcely less familiar is the more elaborate but still impressive passage from Sybil, in which Lord Beaconsfield described the same event.  And yet, as far as my observation has gone, the citations from this fine description have always stopped short just at the opening of the most appropriate passage; my readers, at any rate, shall see it and judge it for themselves.  If there is one feature in the national life of the last sixty years on which Englishmen may justly pride themselves it is the amelioration of the social condition of the workers.  Putting aside all ecclesiastical revivals, all purely political changes, and all appeals, however successful, to the horrible arbitrament of the sword, it is Social Reform which has made the Queen’s reign memorable and glorious.  The first incident of that reign was described in Sybil not only with vivid observation of the present, but with something of prophetic insight into the future.