The public looked on with approval.

A few aristocrats might sniff or titter; but with the nation at large the Queen was now once more extremely popular.

The middle-classes, in particular, were pleased.

They liked a love-match; they liked a household which combined the advantages of royalty and virtue, and in which they seemed to see, reflected as in some resplendent looking-glass, the ideal image of the very lives they led themselves.

Their own existences, less exalted, but oh! so soothingly similar, acquired an added excellence, an added succulence, from the early hours, the regularity, the plain tuckers, the round games, the roast beef and Yorkshire pudding oft Osborne.