"Living" alas! no longer. The last survivor of these ladies died this year, 1903.
II.
LORD RUSSELL
These chapters are founded on Links with the Past. Let me now describe in rather fuller detail three or four remarkable people with whom I had more than a cursory acquaintance, and who allowed me for many years the privilege of drawing without restriction on the rich stores of their political and social recollections.
First among these in point of date, if of nothing else, I must place John Earl Russell, the only person I have ever known who knew Napoleon the Great. Lord Russell—or, to give him the name by which he was most familiar to his countrymen, Lord John Russell—was born in 1792, and when I first knew him he was already old; but it might have been said of him with perfect truth that
"Votiva patuit veluti descripta tabella
Vita senis."