She first gave the usual intellectual explanation of her feeling, 'Mummy, I do think you are the most beautiful Mummy in the whole world,' and then, after a moment's thought, corrected herself by saying, 'But there, they do say love is blind.' A monarch is a life-long candidate, and there exists a singularly elaborate traditional art of producing personal affection for him.

It is more important that he should be seen than that he should speak or act.
His portrait appears on every coin and stamp, and apart from any question of personal beauty, produces most effect when it is a good likeness.

Any one, for instance, who can clearly recall his own emotions during the later years of Queen Victoria's reign, will remember a measurable increase of his affection for her, when, in 1897, a thoroughly life-like portrait took the place on the coins of the conventional head of 1837-1887, and the awkward compromise of the first Jubilee year.

In the case of monarchy one can also watch the intellectualisation of the whole process by the newspapers, the official biographers, the courtiers, and possibly the monarch himself.

The daily bulletin of details as to his walks and drives is, in reality, the more likely to create a vivid impression of his personality, and therefore to produce this particular kind of emotion, the more ordinary the events described are in themselves.