Shortly after their return from the south of France the Gladstones paid a visit to the Prince and Princess of Wales:—
March 30, 1883.—Off at 11.30 to Sandringham. Reception kinder if possible even than heretofore. Wrote.... Read and worked on London municipality. 31, Saturday.—Wrote. Root-cut a small tree in the forenoon; then measured oaks in the park; one of 30 feet. In the afternoon we drove to Houghton, a stately house and place, but woe-begone. Conversation with Archbishop of Canterbury, Prince of Wales and others. Read ... Life of Hatherley, Law's account of Craig. April 1.—Sandringham church, morning. West Newton, evening. Good services and sermons from the archbishop. The Prince bade me read the lessons. Much conversation with the archbishop, also Duke of Cambridge. Read Nineteenth Century on Revised Version; Manning on Education; Life of Hatherley; Craig's Catechism. Wrote, etc. 2.—Off [pg 106] at 11. D. Street 3.15. Wrote to the Queen. Long conversation with the archbishop in the train.
Here a short letter or two may find a place:—
To Lady Jessel on her husband's death.
March 30.—Though I am reluctant to intrude upon your sorrow still so fresh, and while I beg of you on no account to acknowledge this note, I cannot refrain from writing to assure you not only of my sympathy with your grief, but of my profound sense of the loss which the country and its judiciary have sustained by the death of your distinguished husband. From the time of his first entrance into parliament I followed his legal expositions with an ignorant but fervid admiration, and could not help placing him in the first rank, a rank held by few, of the many able and powerful lawyers whom during half a century I have known and heard in parliament. When I came to know him as a colleague, I found reason to admire no less sincerely his superiority to considerations of pecuniary interest, his strong and tenacious sense of the dignity of his office, and his thoroughly frank, resolute, and manly character. These few words, if they be a feeble, yet I assure you are also a genuine, tribute to a memory which I trust will long be cherished. Earnestly anxious that you may have every consolation in your heavy bereavement.
To Cardinal Manning.
April 19.—I thank you much for your kind note, though I am sorry to have given you the trouble of writing it. Both of us have much to be thankful for in the way of health, but I should have, hoped that your extremely spare living would have saved you from the action of anything like gouty tendencies. As for myself, I can in no way understand how it is that for a full half century I have been permitted and enabled to resist a pressure of special liabilities attaching to my path of life, to which so many have given way. I am left as a solitary, surviving all his compeers. But I trust it may not be long ere I escape into some position better suited to declining years.
To Sir W. V. Harcourt.
April 27.—A separate line to thank you for your more than kind words about my rather Alexandrine speech last night; as to [pg 107] which I can only admit that it contained one fine passage—six lines in length.[69] Your “instincts” of kindliness in all personal matters are known to all the world. I should be glad, on selfish grounds, if I could feel sure that they had not a little warped your judicial faculty for the moment. But this misgiving abates nothing from my grateful acknowledgment.
An application was made to him on behalf of a member of the opposite party for a political pension, and here is his reply, to which it may be added that ten years later he had come rather strongly to the view that political pensions should be abolished, and he was only deterred from trying to carry out his view by the reminder from younger ministers, not themselves applicants nor ever likely to be, that it would hardly be a gracious thing to cut off benefactions at a time when the bestowal of them was passing away from him, though he had used them freely while that bestowal was within his reach.