“A sweeter and a lovelier gentleman,
Framed in the prodigality of nature,
The spacious world cannot again afford.”[67]
The void thus left was never filled. Of Graham he wrote to the Duchess of Sutherland:—
Oct. 26.—This most sad and unexpected news from Netherby rises up between me and your letter, I have lost a friend whom I seem to appreciate the more because the world appreciated him so inadequately; his intellectual force could not be denied, but I have never known a person who had such signal virtues that were so little understood. The remainder of my political career be it what it may (and I trust not over long) will be passed in the House of Commons without one old friend who is both political and personal. This is the gradual withdrawal of the props preparing for what is to follow. Let me not, however, seem to complain, for never, I believe, was any one blessed so entirely beyond his deserts in the especial and capital article of friendships.
Not many months later (June 1862) he had to write to Mr. Gordon, “We are all sorely smitten by Canning's death,” [pg 089] whose fame, he said, would “bear the scrutinising judgment of posterity, under whose keen eye so many illusions are doomed to fade away.”[68]
Aberdeen, Graham, And Herbert
In the December of 1861 died the Prince Consort. His last communication to Mr. Gladstone was a letter (Nov. 19) proposing to recommend him as an elder brother of the Trinity House in place of Graham. Of Mr. Gladstone's first interview with the Queen after her bereavement, Dean Wellesley wrote to him that she was greatly touched by his evidence of sympathy. “She saw how much you felt for her, and the mind of a person in such deep affliction is keenly sensitive and observant. Of all her ministers, she seemed to me to think that you had most entered into her sorrows, and she dwelt especially upon the manner in which you had parted from her.” To the Duchess of Sutherland Mr. Gladstone writes:—
March 20, 1862.—I find I must go out at four exactly. In any case I do not like to trust to chance your knowing or not knowing what befell me yesterday. Your advice was excellent. I was really bewildered, but that all vanished when the Queen came in and kept my hand a moment. All was beautiful, simple, noble, touching to the very last degree. It was a meeting, for me, to be remembered. I need only report the first and last words of the personal part of the conversation. The first (after a quarter of an hour upon affairs) was (putting down her head and struggling) “the nation has been very good to me in my time of sorrow”; and the last, “I earnestly pray it may be long before you are parted from one another.”[69]
In the spring he took occasion at Manchester to pronounce a fine panegyric on the Prince,[70] for which the Queen thanked him in a letter of passionate desolation, too sacred in the anguish of its emotion to be printed here. “Every source of interest or pleasure,” she concludes, “causes now the acutest pain. Mrs. Gladstone, who, the Queen knows, is a [pg 090] most tender wife, may in a faint manner picture to herself what the Queen suffers.” Mr. Gladstone replies:—