Spontaneous Tribute

To Our Lovely Young Queen

THIS is an extract from a letter that was not written for pub lication. It is a private letter to the Editor, from a cynical and somewhat sour gentleman who saw the Queen in Fiji. He is beyond the impressionable age—he is a grand father—and, when we saw him last, tie was inclined to jeer at “all of this official blah-blah.” It is a spontaneous tribute, as well as an nteresting sidelight on how young Elizabeth 11, who has assumed the ;errifying duties of the Western World’s oldest and greatest Monarchy, impressed a casual ob server : SHE is—Queen or not—a very lovely woman by any standards; she seems so poised and groomed ind cool and remote (but warmly, ;lowingly so) and dainty even under he conditions of this tropical climate n December. You just can’t magine her putting a foot wrong— >r making the humblest of us feel 11 at ease—or having one smooth lair out of place at any time, under my circumstances. . . You will agree nth me later—that she is, without seing beautiful, one of the loveliest ramen you have ever seen or come inder the spell of —something far seyond anything you expected or irtiat has ever been said or written -bout her.

“Of course, as one who analyses all iropaganda, I know she has been roomed and conditioned for years o make the sourest of us feel that ray. But I believe that she believes hat she has a mission, and that an cute sense of duty, and of the ignity of that mission, has taken er quite beyond the artificiality lat would normally follow such an itense schooling. ... Is this drivel? f so, I am still under that woman’s jell. . . .”