great part upon the world's stage. The weakness of Matilda's position was her love for Struensee. At first she wished him to take no part in politics. "If Struensee had taken my advice, and had not become a minister, it would have been much better," she said, two years later in bitter retrospect, but he overruled her in this as in all else. Everything he did was right in her eyes, and though she sometimes trembled at the perilous path he was treading, when he talked to her of his future policy and his sweeping reforms she believed that he would be hailed as the saviour of the country. She could not see that he was ignorant of statecraft, and made mistakes which a little forethought would have avoided, for she worshipped his commanding talents, and believed him to be a king among men. The Danish Queen's all-absorbing passion for one man was regarded with contempt by the Empress Catherine. It is needless to say she did not condemn it from a moral point of view, for she was a very Messalina in her passions, but because she considered it a fatal weakness in a Queen who apparently aspired to reign over her husband's kingdom and to inaugurate a new system of policy. So far from the similarity between the trials of Catherine's early married life and the Queen of Denmark's sorrows enlisting her sympathy, the Empress regarded Matilda with dislike, mingled with contempt. "I have had the opportunity of seeing the Empress of Russia's sentiments expressed in her own handwriting relative to what is passing in Denmark," wrote Woodford. "The Empress, in a letter to her correspondent, of September 24, says upon the changes in Denmark, 'that allowances are always to be made for the follies of youth, but accompanied with the marks of _a bad heart_ they excite even a public indignation'."[145] [145] Woodford's despatch, Hamburg, October 16, 1770.