My brother George was twice Secretary of State for India. The
Queen was fond of suggesting amendments in the wording of
dispatches relating to India, whilst not altering their sense. My
brother tells me that the alterations suggested by the Queen were
invariably in the direction of simplification. The Queen had a
knack of stripping away unnecessary verbiage and reducing a
sentence to its simplest form, in which its meaning was
unmistakably clear.

All Queen Victoria's tastes were simple. She liked simplicity in
dress, in food, and in her surroundings. If I may say so without
disrespect, I think that Queen Victoria's great hold on her people
came from the fact that, in spite of her high station, she had the
ideals, the tastes, the likes and dislikes of the average clean-
living, clean-minded wife of the average British professional man,
together with the strict ideals as to the sanctity of the
marriage-tie, the strong sense of duty, and the high moral
standard such wives usually possess.

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