I always felt Lady Ashburton would not long outlive Lord Ashburton; she never cared much for anybody else, and was just the woman to fret herself to death. Your affectionate
E. E.
Miss Eden to Lady Theresa Lewis.
Tuesday evening [1851].
MY DEAREST THERESA, I was very glad to see your hand of write again, though you might have given a better account of yourself and Thérèse if you had wished to please. And then poor Bully! That was melancholy; but however, he has been a pleasure to you for years, and that is something, as life goes. I am glad you are up to Lord John’s tricks, because in a general way that very artful young man takes you in in a manner that astonishes me, who sees through him with wonderful perspicacity, and when the Duke[543] told me he was going to Harpton[544] on his way to Knowsley, I thought he was going to try to seduce my boy Sir George [Lewis] from the paths of rectitude.
I wrote so much to your brother of all the Duke of Bedford said of the old statesman being of use to the young one, and the young statesman taking to the old one (words on which he rings the changes till he makes me sick), that I can’t write it all over again; but by dint of positively declining to understand, and by being so intensely stupid as to ask which Lord Stanley he meant (perhaps he of Alderley), and by writing him short, savage notes in the intervals of the weekly luncheons he takes here, I hope I have rather enlightened that slightly damaged article—his mind. It is a good old mind, too, in its little bald shell; but Lord John had evidently persuaded him that new combination of parties was necessary, and that Lord Stanley was, as he always calls him, the young statesman of the age. William Russell has succeeded Lord John at Woburn, and had evidently snubbed the Duke about this alliance, as his tone was quite changed about it, and he was anxious to prove that the friendship began here. Your affectionate
E. E.
Miss Eden to Lady Theresa Lewis.
ADMIRALTY,
Sunday [1851].
MY DEAREST THERESA, I may as well write a line while I can, just in the stages that intervene between the pains of my illness and the pains of my cure; the last being decidedly the worst and the most destructive; my courage has gone for pain.