It is, of course, the easy fashion now to sneer at Victorian
standards. To my mind they embody all that is clean and sound in
the nation. It does not follow that because Victorians revelled in
hideous wall-papers and loved ugly furniture, that therefore their
points-of-view were mistaken ones. There are things more important
than wall-papers. They certainly liked the obvious in painting, in
music, and perhaps in literature, but it hardly seems to follow
logically from that, that their conceptions of a man's duty to his
wife, family, and country were necessarily false ones. They were
not afflicted with the perpetual modern restlessness, nor did they
spend "their time in nothing else, but either to tell, or to hear
some new thing"; still, all their ideas seem to me eminently sweet
and wholesome.
In her old age my mother was the last person living who had seen
George III. She remembered perfectly seeing the old King, in one
of his rare lucid intervals, driving through London, when he was
enthusiastically cheered.
She was also the last person alive who had been at Carlton House
which was pulled down in 1826.
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