Lady Russell to Lady Dunfermline

    VENICE, November 8, 1866

We are all enchanted with this enchanting place....  Thursday (yesterday) was the grand and glorious sight—­how grand and glorious nobody who has not been here and probably nobody who has can conceive....  Newspapers will tell you of the countless gondolas decorated with every variety of brilliant colours—­alike only in the tricolor flag waving from every one of them—­and rowed by gondoliers in every variety of brilliant and picturesque garb—­and they will tell you a great deal more; but they cannot describe the thrill of thousands and thousands of Italian hearts at the moment when their King, “il sospirato nostro Re,” appeared, the winged Lion of St. Mark at one end of his magnificent gondola, a statue of Italy crowned by Venice at the other.  So spirit-stirring a celebration of so great an event we shall never see again, and I rejoice that our children were there.

    Lord Russell to Lady Minto

    VENICE, November 11, 1866

...  We have been delighted with this place, but especially with being here to see the crowning of the edifice of Italian Independence.  The people have rather their hearts full than their voices loud.  When the Italian flag was first raised none of the crowd could cheer for weeping and sobbing.  It is a mighty change....  We have seen many pictures.  I am exceedingly struck with the number of fine pictures, the magnificent colouring, and the large conceptions of the Venetian painters—­faulty in drawing very often, as Michelangelo said long ago, but wonderfully satisfying to the imagination.

They returned to England early in 1867.

It was a critical time in the history of the franchise.  Neither Lord Derby nor his followers liked Reform, but the workmen of England were at last set upon it, and Disraeli realized that only a party prepared to enlarge the franchise had any chance of power.  Unlike his colleagues, he had no fear or dislike of the people.  His imagination enabled him to foresee what hardly another statesman, Conservative or Radical, supposed possible, that the power of the Democracy might be increased without kindling in the people any desire to use it.  He divined that the glamour which wealth and riches have for the majority of voters would make it easy to put a hook in the nose of Leviathan, and that the monster might be ultimately taken in tow by the Conservative party.  His first move in the process of “educating his party” was to offer the House a series of Resolutions upon the principles of representation.  These were intended to foreshadow the nature of the Government’s proposals and also to prepare their way.  By this device he hoped to raise the Bill above party conflict, and to lead the more Conservative of his followers up a gently graduated slope of generalities till they found themselves committed to accepting a somewhat democratic measure.  His plan was frustrated by the determination of the Opposition to force the Government to show their hand at once.