But to be serious, I am at a loss how to thank you as I ought.  How
    I lament that I have hung my harp upon the willow!

    Yours ever,

    S.R.

In later years Thackeray and Charles Dickens were welcome guests, and the cordial friendship between Lord and Lady John and Dickens lasted till his death in 1870.  Dickens said in a speech at Liverpool in 1869 that “there was no man in England whom he respected more in his public capacity, loved more in his private capacity, or from whom he had received more remarkable proofs of his honour and love of literature than Lord John Russell.”

Among poets, Tennyson and Browning were true friends; Longfellow also visited Pembroke Lodge, and impressed Lady Russell by his gentle and spiritual nature; and Lowell was one of her most agreeable guests.  With Sir Henry Taylor, whose “Philip van Artevelde” she admired, the intercourse was, from her youth to old age, intimate and affectionate.

Mr. Lecky, a faithful friend, gave a picture of the society at Pembroke Lodge, which may be quoted here: 

For some years after Lord Russell’s retirement from ministerial life he gathered around him at Pembroke Lodge a society that could hardly be equalled—­certainly not surpassed—­in England.  In the summer Sunday afternoons there might be seen beneath the shade of those majestic oaks nearly all that was distinguished in English politics, and much that was distinguished in English literature, and few eminent foreigners visited England without making a pilgrimage to the old statesman. [99]

[99] “Life of Lord John Russell,” by Stuart J. Reid, p. 351.

Mr. Frederic Harrison was one of Lady Russell’s best friends in the last years of her life, and her keen interest in the Irish Question brought her into close and intimate intercourse with Mr. Justin McCarthy, who knew her so well in these days of busy and sequestered old age that his recollections, given in the last chapter of this volume, are valuable.

Among the men of science she knew best were Sir Richard Owen, a near neighbour in Richmond Park, Sir Joseph Hooker, and Professor Tyndall, one of the most genial and delightful of her guests.

There is a passage in Sir Henry Taylor’s autobiography which speaks of her in earlier times, but it expresses an impression she made till her death on many who met her: 

I have been rather social lately, ... and went to a party at Lord John Russell’s, where I met the Archbishop of York....  A better meeting was with Lady Lotty Elliot, the one of the Minto Elliots who is now about the age that her elder sisters were when I first knew them some sixteen or eighteen years ago....  They are a fine set of girls and women, those Minto Elliots, full of literature and poetry and nature; and Lady John, whom I knew best in former days, is still very attractive to me; and now that she is relieved from the social toils of a First Minister’s