"My Dear Dilke,
"I have just seen with the deepest sympathy and sorrow the news of the terrible loss you have sustained.
"Consolation would be idle in presence of such a blow, but I should like you to feel that as an old friend, separated by the unhappy political differences of these later years, I still share your personal grief in losing a companion so devoted to you, and so well qualified to aid and strengthen you in all the work and anxiety of your active life.
"When the first great shock is past, I earnestly trust that you may
find in the continued performance of your public duties some
alleviation of your private sorrow, and I assure you most earnestly
of my sympathy in this time of trial.
"Believe me,
"Yours very truly,
"J. Chamberlain."
Mr. Morley wrote also:
"My Dear Dilke,
"I did not hear the news of the unhappy stroke that has befallen you until it was a fortnight old. You need not to be told what a shock it was. I think that I had known her longer than anybody—from the time of a college ball at Oxford in 1859; a radiant creature she then was. To me her friendship was unwavering, down to the last time I saw her, when she gave me a long and intime talk about the things that, as you know, she had most at heart. I am deeply and sincerely sorry and full of sympathy with you. Words count little in such a disaster, but this I hope you will believe. "Ever yours, "John Morley."
When after his wife's death Sir Charles again took up his life in London, those who saw him off his guard recognized keenly the effect of this last sudden blow, heavier because unexpected. The very mainspring of his life had been weakened. But he exerted himself to prepare Lady Dilke's unpublished writings, and to write the memoir which prefaced them. Of this he says:
'I put my whole soul into the work of bringing out her posthumous book with a proper memoir, and it nearly killed me. I was never so pleased with anything as with the success of the book. To hundreds of the best people it seems to have meant and said all that I wished it to say and mean.'
Probably, also, to many readers it gave for the first time a true image, not of her only for whose sake it was written, but of him who wrote. One letter of this moment deserves to be put on record. Mr. Arnold-Forster wrote: