SPRING MEETING. 223 



history, and compared with the men who had served her — Lord 

 Melbourne, Lord Russell, and Sir Robert Peel, down to the men 

 of the present time — the Queen might be said to have made 

 fewer mistakes through the whole of her long reign than any 

 one of them. It was his belief that posterity would confirm the 

 view of contemporary critics that Queen Victoria had made no 

 political mistakes, and that was the greatest merit the Queen as a 

 constitutional monarch could hope to have assigned her. 



