theatre shall therefore not be called
into requisition any more to turn me into
a trumpery municipal masquerader, or to
take your Majesty off, on allegorical false
pretences, as a Heathen goddess horrible to
view, or as the eminent modern lady who
goes up the Tight-rope, amongst Fireworks,
in the public gardens."

Can it be imagined that, in all her progresses,
the Queen ever saw anything half so striking,
pleasant, and memorable to her as the miles
of working-people who turned out to receive
her at Manchester? It would be preposterous
to suppose that she can be otherwise
than interested in the real, honest, everyday
aspect of her populous towns, in
which multitudes of her subjects live
and die, working wearily all their lives
long to make the commodities for which
England is famous; slowly, surely,
resolutely hammering out her greatness in the
arts of peace and war, from a pin's head to a
monster mortar. It is only reasonable to
believe that the Queen is naturally and
deeply interested in such sights as these.
But what sane man can suppose that she is
interested in poles and canvas, and red
drugget, and theatrical properties, which take
nobody in, and which lead to the most
inexcusably wasteful expenditure of money.
Is not every town which opens its purse
to pay for such sadly mistaken loyalty, sick
and sorry for weeks afterwards?  And what
has the futile demonstration done for the
Queen after all?  It has probably given her
beloved Majesty the headache. It has
certainly offended her taste; which is formed, be
it remembered, in her own sphere, on the
finest models that the Art of the civilised
world can supply. And, worst and clumsiest
mistake of all, it has flatly contradicted the
principle on which the Queen's own appearance
is regulated when she travels. When the
Queen visits a town, does she drive into it in
the state coach, dressed in the robes in which
she assembles Parliament, with the sceptre
in one hand and the ball in the other, and
the crown jewels, instead of a bonnet, on her
head?  No: she comes attired quietly and
in excellent taste — dressed, in a word, as a
lady should be dressed. All the people who
look at her, see her enter the place she visits,
simply and sensibly, in her own natural everyday
character — and see the unfortunate town,
on the other hand, carefully deprived of as
much of its natural, everyday character as
the mayor and corporation can possibly
take away from it. How the local officials
can survey the Queen's natural, nineteenth-
century bonnet passing under a miserably
ineffectual imitation of a pagan arch of
triumph, without acutely feeling the rebuke
which that eloquent part of her Majesty's
costume administers to them, entirely passes
our comprehension. Surely the reporters
conceal from us a certain class of municipal
accident: surely there are sensitive mayors,
who, on such occasions as these, sink
self-reproachfully into their own robes, and are
seen no more.

Not that we rashly despise a mayor. He
is sometimes an excellent fellow; but why—
still connecting him with state receptions—
why, like the town he rules, should he go
wildly out of his way on account of a royal
visit? And why, above all, should the
unfortunate man get into the Queen's way? Surely
it is time that those ridiculous Addresses which
he brings obstinately to station-platforms, and
presents, like a kind of unnecessary newspaper,
at carriage-windows, should pass into the
Limbo of charity-boys' Christmas Pieces? We
ought, however, to ask pardon of those obsolete
works of art, for comparing them with
Mayors' Addresses — for the Christmas-piece,
awkward as it might have been in execution,
was, at least in intention, a remembrance of
the Life of Christ. But what can be said for
the Addresses? As a form of welcome to
the Queen, they are utterly superfluous; the
sound substance of the welcome having been
administered in the best of all ways beforehand
by the cheering voices of the people. Must
we look at the Addresses as specimens of
composition? If we do, we find them to be
a species of literary hunting-field, in which
every substantive is a terrified stag, run
down by a pack of yelping tautological
adjectives. For the sake of the mayor—  a
man and a brother; a human being who has
surely done us no serious harm—  for the
sake of the mayor, who comes up
innocently to her Majesty's carriage window,
the unconscious bearer of a document
which accredits him as a mauler of her
Majesty's English, suppress the further
production of Municipal Addresses! Don't
we know that her Majesty laughs at
the Mayor, and that everybody laughs at the
Mayor except, of course, his own family.
When the Mayor is a sensible fellow, he even
laughs at himself in his official sleeve. But
how hard, how unjust, how utterly indefensible,
when a man has a sense of the ridiculous,
to condemn him cruelly to exercise it
on himself!

Even the  railways have caught the
contagion. It was only the other day that
the Peterborough Refreshment Room, on
the Great Northern, hearing of the Queen's
approach, suddenly became ashamed of
being a Refreshment Room, and tried in
the most miserable manner, to be a Drawing
Room, or a Boudoir, or — Heaven only knows
what! So frightfully did it blink all over
with mirrors; so madly did it blister itself
with tinsel; that no apartment in the least
like it was ever yet known to mortals;
unless we dignify an inferior class of doll's
house or a bad bon-bon box with the style
and title of an apartment. Is there anything
treasonable in the act of calming the
uproarious appetites of her Majesty's subjects?
Is it part of our duty to our sovereign