Queen-making is not a light task. It is no fancywork for idle hours. It
is the first difficult draft of a chapter, perhaps a whole volume, of
national history.

No woman ever undertook a more important labor than did the widowed
Duchess of Kent, or carried it out with more faithfulness, if we may
judge by results.

The lack of fortune in the family was not an unmixed evil; perhaps it was
even one of those disagreeable "blessings in disguise," which nobody
welcomes, but which the wise profit by, as it caused the Duchess to
impress upon her children, especially the child Victoria, the necessity
of economy, and the safety and dignity which one always finds in living
within one's income. Frugality, exactitude in business, faithfulness to
all engagements, great or small, punctuality, that economy of time, are
usually set down among the minor moralities of life, more humdrum than
heroic; but under how many circumstances and conditions do they reveal
themselves as cardinal virtues, as things on which depend the comfort and
dignity of life! It seems that these things were so impressed on the mind
and heart of the young Victoria by her careful, methodical German mother,
that they became a part of her conscience, entered so deeply into the
rule of her life that no after-condition of wealth, or luxury, or
sovereign independence; no natural desire for ease or pleasure; no
passion of love or grief; no possible exigencies of imperial state have
been able to overcome or set them aside. The danger is that such rigid
principles, such systematic habits, adopted in youth, may in age become,
from being the ministers of one's will, the tyrants of one's life.