Lady John Russell herself is an abiding example of the best type of woman, quick to sympathise, ready to counsel, who, while admiring her husband as a statesman and giving him every assistance in his public career, admired the man more than the politician. After the birth of their eldest son, she wrote:
“Millions thy patriot voice attend,
Mine, only mine, thy gentler tone;
With thee in blissful gaze to bend
This flow’ret o’er is mine alone.”
It was the quiet, retired life she loved and preferred. Sir Henry Taylor met her in 1852—she was approaching forty—for the first time since her girlhood, when he had known her very well indeed. Of their meeting he wrote: “I recollect some years ago, in going through the heart of the city, somewhere behind Cheapside, to have come upon the courtyard of an antique house, with grass and flowers and green trees growing as quietly as if it was the garden of a farmhouse in Northumberland. Lady John reminds me of it.” The words fitly sum up Lady Russell’s character.
IV
LADY PALMERSTON
“Full of vivacity, she surprises and interests; she finds her chief pleasure in conversing with persons of worth and reputation, and this not so much to be known to them, as to know them.”
Lady Palmerston was one of the favourites of fortune. Born of a distinguished family, sister of one Prime Minister and wife of another, the trusted confidante of both, endowed by nature with beauty and charm, with keen intelligence and sprightly wit, she was a queen of society from eighteen to eighty, and for the last thirty years of that period an important factor, through her husband, in the great political affairs of the world.
LADY PALMERSTON
After Swinton