[Queen Victoria by Lytton Strachey]@TWC D-Link bookQueen Victoria CHAPTER IX 49/64
This was what might have been expected; for Lehzen was the daughter of a Lutheran pastor, and the Lutherans and the Presbyterians have much in common.
For many years Dr. Norman Macleod, an innocent Scotch minister, was her principal spiritual adviser; and, when he was taken from her, she drew much comfort from quiet chats about life and death with the cottagers at Balmoral. Her piety, absolutely genuine, found what it wanted in the sober exhortations of old John Grant and the devout saws of Mrs.P. Farquharson.
They possessed the qualities, which, as a child of fourteen, she had so sincerely admired in the Bishop of Chester's "Exposition of the Gospel of St.Matthew;" they were "just plain and comprehensible and full of truth and good feeling." The Queen, who gave her name to the Age of Mill and of Darwin, never got any further than that. From the social movements of her time Victoria was equally remote. Towards the smallest no less than towards the greatest changes she remained inflexible.
During her youth and middle age smoking had been forbidden in polite society, and so long as she lived she would not withdraw her anathema against it.
Kings might protest; bishops and ambassadors, invited to Windsor, might be reduced, in the privacy of their bedrooms, to lie full-length upon the floor and smoke up the chimney--the interdict continued! It might have been supposed that a female sovereign would have lent her countenance to one of the most vital of all the reforms to which her epoch gave birth--the emancipation of women--but, on the contrary, the mere mention of such a proposal sent the blood rushing to her head.
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