Stockmar had been the private physician
of Leopold, King of the Belgians, in his earlier days, and in the course
of events became the trusted adviser of the young Prince Albert. To him
the Queen and the prince wrote as only dutiful children might write to the
most affectionate and wisest of parents. They sought his advice and
followed it. They reared their children to do him honour. What this friend
was, may be gathered from what shrewd people thought of him. Lord
Palmerston, no partial critic, declared, 'I have come in my life across
only one absolutely disinterested man, and that is--Stockmar.' Subtle
aphorisms on the conduct of life may be culled, almost at random, from his
letters to the royal pair. We can take but one, which, read in conjunction
with the lives he influenced, is deeply significant:
'Were I now to be asked,' he wrote as he drew near his seventieth year,
'by any young man just entering into life, "What is the chief good for
which it behoves a man to strive?" my only answer would be "Love and
Friendship." Were he to ask me, "What is a man's most priceless
possession?" I must answer, "The consciousness of having loved and sought
the truth--of having yearned for the truth for its own sake! All else is
either mere vanity or a sick man's dream."'
John Bright once said of the Queen, that she was 'the most perfectly
truthful person I ever met.
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