The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1875-02-06 00:00:00

PRINCE LEOPOLD.

During the whole week the friends of the Royal
family and the nation at large have been anxiously
awaiting day after day for more favourable news con-
cerning the health of Prince Leopold. His delicate
constitution and the constant hemorrhage to which he
is subject have aggravated the danger of his illness,
and the natural sympathy which so much suffering
must excite has been considerably enhanced by the
knowledge that he is endowed with more intelligence
than usually falls to the lot of princes. From his
earliest youth he has been compelled to live the quiet
and retired life of a patient. While the Prince of
Wales distinguished himself as a sportsman and learned
the duties of a landlord, and while his other two
brothers served in the navy and army,the utmost Prince
Leopold could do was to follow, in the quietest manner
possible, the ordinary course of studies of an Oxford
undergraduate. Doubtless, had his health permitted,
the public would have been better acquainted with
the Prince; for, notwithstanding the disadvantages
under which be has laboured, he has not neglected any
opportunity of improving his mind; and many persons
anticipated that Prince Leopold would be a worthy
successor to the Prince Consort as a patron of art and
industry. In very many cases it has been given to the
youngest son to become the scholar of the family ;
and, but for his health, there is no reason to doubt
that a brilliant career would open to the young
Prince. Born in April, 1853, he was named
Leopold George Duncan Albert, Duke of Saxony
and Prince of Coburg and Gotha. He became
also Knight of the Garter and of the Thistle.
The care of his earlier studies was intrusted to a
German professor, Herr Buff, under whose able
guidance the Prince soon acquired those scholarly tastes
which particularly distinguish him. He sought with
special fervour to fathom the poetic meaning, philo-
sophical truths, and grandeur of conception of the
ancient classic authors. When, at a later date, he
entered the University of Oxford, he soon gathered
round him a circle of fellow-students who still speak
highly of him. His example is certainly most bene-
ficial to the youth of the country. There is a growing
tendency among many young men of the present day
to look upon a studious companion as a nuisance; and
they imagine the pursuit of pleasure and excitement
to be the sole object of life. It is indeed fortunate
when a Prince wises to counteract so fatal a current;
and if a good fashion cannot be enforced unless
Royalty leads the way, we have all the more reason
to be content with the excellent work unconsciously.
achieved by Prince Leopold. Some result has there-
fore been attained without any public effort, for
Prince Leopold has never once addressed a meeting,
nor have any of his ideas been propagated otherwise
than by the force of example. Apart from classics,
and despite his ill-health, the Prince has always taken
the greatest interest in military affairs, and has
studied strategy as if he hoped to contribute one of
these days to his country's defence. His leisure time
has been frequently devoted to the quiet enjoyment of
music; for the Prince is an ardent lover of harmony,
and the melodies that have relieved the quietude of
his study have also soothed the pain and wearying
effects of constant illness. Debarred from outdoor
pleasures, frequently unable to receive even his most
intimate friends, Prince Leopold has surrounded him-
self with volumes that are the best of companions, and
contented himself with simple music instead of long-
ing for the glitter of courts and the artificial excite-
ment of fashionable society. This—what may seem
a monotonous and uneventful life—nevertheless conveys
a lesson that might improve even the highest, while
it will elicit the approbation and sympathy of the
multitude. It is mot sad to see so young a man as
Prince Leopold doomed—if he survive the present
attack—to a life of continued suffering. The "divinity
that doth hedge a king" cannot shield him from the
great leveller, and the position into which the Prince
was born cannot soften the hardship which his isolated
youth, his continual spasms of illness, entail upon
him. To our mind there is something inexpressibly
sad in the remembrance of his brave qualities of heart
and mind, connected as they are with a life of con-
stantly recurring pain—if he survive the present im-
minent crisis. The princely lot is not always cast
in pleasant places, after all.—Pictorial World.

Referring to the illness of Prince Leopold, The Times, in a
leader, also says :

. . . Prince Leopold's tastes, though unavoidably
divorced from the robust occupations of the ordinary
young Englishman, have by no means pointed to a
useless or effeminate refinement. He has been able
to sympathize with much that he has been precluded
from sharing, and the promise of mature develop-
ment which he has given has justified in a remark-
able degree the comprehensive plan of education for
the Queen's children which occupied so large a space
in the thoughts of the late Prince Consort. Prince
Leopold is, perhaps, more than any of his brothers
the heir of his father's thoughtful and scholarly
habit of mind. It is probable that, even had health
permitted, the multifarious education proper for the
Heir to the Throne, and the labours and perils which
entered into the training of his sailor and
soldier brothers, would have been unsuitable to his
temperament. Nature and circumstances alike indi-
cated for him a training analogous to that of the stu-
dent and the artist, and in the pursuit of this career
Prince Leopold has sought and found at once a suitable
employment for his active mind and a suitable allevia-
tion for his physical debility.
The public has known but little of his Royal High-
ness, except that his temper is amiable, his presence
engaging, and his patience under his lifelong trial
exemplary. His life has been one of privacy, which
was -hardly infringed by his recent residence as a
student at the University of Oxford. The undoubted
fact that he found a congenial sphere in that modified
form of University life which his physical ills per-
mitted him to enjoy proves better than anything else
the wisdom which destined him to it. Living most
unostentatiously and in half-retirement, he quietly
drew around him a circle of sympathetic friends. His
thoughfful mood readily and habitually fed on every
element of those interesting surroundings which never
fail to impress the young new-comers, and are as apt
to mould the Prince as the peasant into the graceful
type of the student and the scholar. More than is
usual with Royal undergraduates, he identified him-
self with the best and most legitimate elements of
University life, though by no means to the exclusion
of those which are more commonly popular. The
Prince has a genuine love of knowledge, and he has pur-
sued it in the spirit of a genuine student. The occa-
sional visitor to Oxford during the last two or three
years can hardly have been insensible of the pleasant
influence, unobtru3ive though it was, which the
presence of the Queen's youngest son exercised. His
slight form was constantly seen in the lecture-hall, at
the debating club, and at the musical gathering, in the
last of which, whether as an instrumentalist or
vocalist, he was, like his late father, qualified to render
no mean assistance Yet he by no means turned away
from the rougher pursuits of his hardier fellows.
He mingled assiduously in every phase of what he
found to be so interesting a life around him, and his
modest bonhomie and quiet endeavour to please en-
deared him alike to young and to old. It was
natural, however, that Prince Leopold should be
disposed to turn for society and sympathy in his
pursuits rather to the senior than to the junior mem-
bers of the University. While readily accessible to
all, though he might sympathize with, he could hardly
share, the pursuits of his natural contemporaries. We
are justified in saying that he has exhibited no mean
faculty in diserhninating the presence of superior
minds, and those who were more than ordinarily
about him can testify to the pleasant gratitude he has
evinced towards those who have shown themselves
more fully alive than could be expected in younger
men to the peculiar forms of relief which his tempera-
ment demanded. Should a beneficent Providence
spare him, his University experience will have supplied
no unworthy foundation for a useful existence ;
and should improved health as well as life
be in store for him, a career may reasonatly be pre-
dicted which will compare not disadvantageously with
that of any Prince of the Royal House, and may recall
with some fidelity the traits of that thoughtful and ac-
complished prototype upon which it has been wisely
sought to model his education. Prince Leopold has en-
deavoured to reflect, to make 'his own, and to spread
around him that sound cultivation and healthy refine
ment which it was the business of the Prince Consort
to introduce into English life. With his father's
thoughtful and painstaking temperament, he has en-
deavoured to enter fully and beneficially into what lay
before him, to do his duty in the state of life to which
Providence has called him, and, as far as in him lay,
to leave the world better, happier, and worthier than
he found it.

The nation is prompt to respond to the domestio
griefs and joys of its Queen. It may be said with
truth that few are the instances in history where a
people has so entirely rejoiced in its Sovereign's joys,
shared her anxieties, and sympathized with her sorrows.
Those are yet alive who remember the universal

sorrow for a child of the ;Ration, cut off in her early
womanhood, whose place her present Majesty was
destined to occupy. Ten years ago the Queen was
doomed to mourn the loss in advanced years of that
faithful friend and adviser with whom the nation had
so profoundly sympathized when the young Princess
Charlotte was snatched from him, and on the
present occasion the English people has been hardly
less moved by the mournful anticipation of losing the
promising young Prince to whom the late King of the
Belgians gave his name. We can at present do no more
than hope that our apprehensions may be before long
completely removed, and we cannot but recall that the
Prince of Wales, under somewhat similar conditions,
was mercifully spared to his family and to the nation.
We shall not appear presumptnously to weigh sacred
things in a vulgar balance if we say that these severe
trials have been exceptional in the domestic for-
tunes of the Royal Family. Saving one great and
ever-memotable loss, the joys of the Queen's House
have far outweighed its calamities. The Queen
regarded, as this nation loves to regard her, as a
mother, has been exceptionally blessed. A large family
has grown up around her, and, though the threatening
dart has more than once been uplifted, no breach has.
been made in its fair ranks by the hand of death.
If it is considered how few families escape having to
lament the loss of some well-beloved member of
the second generation, the Royal House of Eng-
land will be found to have been highly favoured.
The crisis of Prince Leopold's illness is watched
with various interest by the august relatives, in their
several degrees, to whom he was intimately known,
by those whom his brief contact with the outer world
has made his friends, and by a loyal nation, from
whom nothing is alien that affects the domestic felicity
of the Royal House to which it has so long looked up
with affectionate reverence. But, above all, the heart
of a great people is with their Queen in her deep
anxiety; and their sympathy is the stronger from the
sense that it will bs graciously accepted and worthily
appreciated.