We could
not let these great folk of old into our drawing-rooms.
Queen Elizabeth would positively not be eligible for a
housemaid. The old manners and the old customs go sinking
from grade to grade, until, if some mighty emperor revisited
the glimpses of the moon, he would not find any one of his
way of thinking, any one he could strike hands with and talk
to freely and without offence, save perhaps the porter at the
end of the street, or the fellow with his elbows out who
loafs all day before the public-house. So that this little
note of vulgarity is not a thing to be dwelt upon; it is to
be put away from us, as we recall the fashion of these old
intimacies; so that we may only remember Knox as one who was
very long-suffering with women, kind to them in his own way,
loving them in his own way - and that not the worst way, if
it was not the best - and once at least, if not twice, moved
to his heart of hearts by a woman, and giving expression to
the yearning he had for her society in words that none of us
need be ashamed to borrow.
And let us bear in mind always that the period I have gone
over in this essay begins when the Reformer was already
beyond the middle age, and already broken in bodily health:
it has been the story of an old man's friendships. This it
is that makes Knox enviable. Unknown until past forty, he
had then before him five-and-thirty years of splendid and
influential life, passed through uncommon hardships to an
uncommon degree of power, lived in his own country as a sort
of king, and did what he would with the sound of his voice
out of the pulpit.
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