Rollo’s reader is reading Molesworth’s “History of England for the last Forty Years,” and Agatha takes advantage and listens, and I read it by myself, and as your father knows it all without reading it and likes to be talked to about it, we have been living a good deal in the great events of that period, and we find it a relief to turn from the mazy though deeply interesting flood of metaphysics which this age pours upon the world, to facts and events which also have their philosophy, and a deep one too.

    PEMBROKE LODGE, December 28, 1874

Finished “Life of Prince Albert.”  It is seldom that a revelation of the inner life of Princes would raise the mind to a higher region than before—­although we all know that they have an inner and a real life through the tinsels and the trappings in which we see them.  But this book can hardly fail to raise any mind, warm any heart, brace any soul.  Would that we all, in all conditions of life, kept truth and duty ever before us, as he did even amid the pettinesses of a Court—­the solemn trifles of etiquette which would have stifled the nobleness of a less noble nature.  Would that all Princes had a Stockmar, [88] but there are not many Stockmars in the world; if there were, there would soon not be many Princes of the kind which now abounds, beings cut off from equality, friendship, freedom, by what in our supreme folly we call the “necessary” pomp and fetters of a Court.  Noble as Prince Albert was, those things did him harm, and as Lady Lyttelton says, nobody but the organ knew what was in him....  The Queen appears in a charming light—­truthfulness, humility, unbounded love for him.

[88] “One of the best friends of the Queen and the Prince Consort was Baron Stockmar.  This old nobleman, who had known the English Court since the days of George III, and loved Prince Albert like a son, was a man of sturdy independence, fearlessly outspoken, and regarded with affectionate confidence both by Queen Victoria and her Consort.”—­Daily News, May 7, 1910.  This was what Lady Russell felt about him; his fearless outspokenness at Court always impressed her.

    Lady Russell to Lord Amberley

    PEMBROKE LODGE, December 29, 1874

M. d’Etchegoyen [89] has given me Mill’s three essays.  I have read “Nature,” a great deal of which I like much, but were it to be read by the inhabitant of some other planet, he would have a very false notion of this one; for Mill dwells almost entirely on the ugly and malevolent side of Nature, leaving out of sight the beautiful and benevolent side—­whereas both abound, and suggest the notion of two powers at strife for the government of the world.  If you bring the “Conscious Machine Controversy,” I may read it, although I feel very uncharitable to the hard, presumptuous unwisdom of some modern metaphysics.

[89] The Comte and Comtesse d’Etchegoyen (nee Talleyrand) were intimate friends of Lord and Lady Russell.  He was a French Republican, who had been obliged to leave Paris at the Coup d’Etat.