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.  In 1870, her eye having fallen upon the report of a meeting in favour of Women’s Suffrage, she wrote to Mr. Martin in royal rage—­“The Queen is most anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or write to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of ‘Woman’s Rights,’ with all its attendant horrors, on which her poor feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feeling and propriety.  Lady—­ought to get a good whipping.  It is a subject which makes the Queen so furious that she cannot contain herself.  God created men and women different—­then let them remain each in their own position.  Tennyson has some beautiful lines on the difference of men and women in ‘The Princess.’  Woman would become the most hateful, heartless, and disgusting of human beings were she allowed to unsex herself; and where would be the protection which man was intended to give the weaker sex?  The Queen is sure that Mrs. Martin agrees with her.”  The argument was irrefutable; Mrs. Martin agreed; and yet the canker spread.

In another direction Victoria’s comprehension of the spirit of her age has been constantly asserted.  It was for long the custom for courtly historians and polite politicians to compliment the Queen upon the correctness of her attitude towards the Constitution.  But such praises seem hardly to be justified by the facts.  In her later years Victoria more than once alluded with regret to her conduct during the Bedchamber crisis, and let it be understood that she had grown wiser since.  Yet in truth it is difficult to trace any fundamental change either in her theory or her practice in constitutional matters throughout her life.  The same despotic and personal spirit which led her to break off the negotiations with Peel is equally visible in her animosity towards Palmerston, in her threats of abdication to Disraeli, and in her desire to prosecute the Duke of Westminster for attending a meeting upon Bulgarian atrocities.  The complex and delicate principles of the Constitution cannot be said to have come within the compass of her mental faculties; and in the actual developments which it underwent during her reign she played a passive part.  From 1840 to 1861 the power of the Crown steadily