him to feel for others; age has deepened his religion of love.  All that so often lowers commoner natures has but raised his.

In February, 1868, Lord Derby resigned, owing to ill health.  “With Lord Derby [says Sir Spencer Walpole [69]] a whole race of statesmen disappeared.  He was the last of the Prime Ministers who had held high office before the Reform Act of 1832; and power, on his fall, was to be transferred to men not much younger in point of years, but whose characters and opinions had been moulded by other influences.  He was, moreover, the last of the Tories.  He had, indeed, by his own concluding action made Toryism impossible; for, in 1867, he had thrown the ramparts of Toryism into a heap, and had himself mounted the structure and fired the funeral pile.”  Disraeli succeeded him as Prime Minister.

[69] “The History of Twenty-five Years,” vol. ii, p. 287.

    Lady Russell to Mr. Rollo Russell

    CHESHAM PLACE, February 18, 1868

...Lord Derby is supposed to be dying, I am sorry to say.  It is horrible to hear the street criers bawling out in their catchpenny voices, “Serious illness of Lord Derby.”  I feel for his wife and all belonging to him without any of the flutter and anxiety about your father which a probable change of Ministry would have caused a few years ago.  He will never accept office again.  This is right, I know, and I am thankful that on the conviction of its being so he has calmly made up his mind—­yet there is deep sadness in it.  The newspapers are not favourable to his pamphlets on Ireland [three pamphlets published together afterwards under the title, “A letter to the Right Hon. Chichester Fortescue"].  He does not care much about this, provided men in Parliament adopt his views or something like them.

    We find London very sociable and pleasant ... people all looking
    glad to meet, and fresh and pleasant from their country life, quite
    different from what they will be in July....

Lady Russell, as well as her husband, was always anxious to encourage perfect freedom and independence of thought in her children.  The following passages are from a letter to her daughter on her fifteenth birthday: 

    37 CHESHAM PLACE, March 28, 1868

...  Every day will now bring you more independence of mind, more capacity to understand, not merely to adopt the thoughts of others, to reason and to form opinions of your own.  I am the more sure of this, that yours is a thoughtful and reflective mind.  The voice of God may sometimes sound differently to you from what it sounds even to your father or to me; if so, never be afraid to say so—­never close your mind against any but bad thoughts; for although we are all one in as far as we all partake of God’s spirit, which is the breath of life, still the communion of each soul with Him is, and must be, for that soul alone....  Nothing great is easy,