aid him; and when the old man, undismayed, persisted in carrying out his act of homage, she asked quickly, “May I not get up and meet him?” and descended one or two steps to save him the ascent.  The ready natural kindliness of the royal action awoke ecstatic applause, which could hardly have been heartier had the applauders known how true a type that act supplied of Her Majesty’s future conduct.  She has never feared to peril her dignity by descending a step or two from her throne, when “sweet mercy, nobility’s true badge,” has seemed to require such a descent.  And her queenly dignity has never been thereby lessened.  “She never ceases to be a Queen,” says Greville a propos of this scene, “and is always the most charming, cheerful, obliging, unaffected Queen in the world.”

[Illustration:  Elizabeth Fry]

That “the people” were more considered in the arrangements for this coronation than they had been on any previous occasion of the sort was a circumstance quite in harmony with certain other signs of the times.  “The night is darkest before the dawn,” and amid all the gloom which enshrouded the land there could be discerned the stir and movement that herald the coming of the day.  Men’s minds were turning more and more to the healing of the world’s wounds.  Already one great humane enterprise had been carried through in the emancipation of the slaves in British Colonies; already the vast work of prison reform had been well begun, through the saintly Elizabeth Fry, whose life of faithful service ended ere the Queen had reigned eight years.  The very year of Her Majesty’s accession was signalised by two noteworthy endeavours to put away wrong.  We will turn first to that which seems the least immediately philanthropic, although the injustice which it remedied was trivial in appearance only, since in its everyday triviality it weighed most heavily on the most numerous class—­that of the humble and the poor.

[Illustration:  Rowland Hill]

How would the Englishman of to-day endure the former exactions of the Post Office?  The family letters of sixty years ago, written on the largest sheets purchasable, crossed and crammed to the point of illegibility, filled with the news of many and many a week, still witness of the time when “a letter from London to Brighton cost eightpence, to Aberdeen one and threepence-halfpenny, to Belfast one and fourpence”; when, “if the letter were written on more than one sheet, it came under the operation of a higher scale of charges,” and when the privilege of franking letters, enjoyed and very largely exercised by members of Parliament and members of the Government, had the peculiar effect of throwing the cost of the mail service exactly on that part of the community which was least able to bear it.  The result of the injustice was as demoralising as might have been expected.  The poorer people who desired to have tidings of distant friend or relative were driven by the prohibitory rates of postage into