Lady Russell to Sir Henry Taylor

    February 29, 1884

I have just been reading with painful interest “Memoires d’un Protestant condamne aux Galeres” in the days of that terribly little great man Louis XIV.  I ask myself at every page, “Did man really so treat his fellow-man? or is it all historical nightmare?” I never can make the slightest allowance for persecutors on the ground that “they thought it right to persecute.”  They had no business so to think.

    Mr. Gladstone to Lady Russell

    December 14, 1884

I thank you for and return Dr. Westcott’s interesting and weighty letter....  A very clever man, a Bampton lecturer, evidently writing with good and upright intention, sends me a lecture in which he lays down the qualities he thinks necessary to make theological study fruitful.  They are courage, patience, and sympathy.  He omits one quality, in my opinion even more important than any of them, and that is reverence.  Without a great stock of reverence mankind, as I believe, will go to the bad....

During the strife and heat of the controversy on Home Rule, Lady Russell received the following letter from Mr. Gladstone: 

    10, DOWNING STREET, WHITEHALL,

    June 10, 1886

MY DEAR LADY RUSSELL,—­I am not less gratified than touched by your most acceptable note.  It is most kind in you personally to give me at a critical time the assurance of your sympathy and approval.  And I value it as a reflected indication of what would, I believe, have been the course, had he been still among us, of one who was the truest disciple of Mr. Fox, and was like him ever forward in the cause of Ireland, a right handling of which he knew lay at the root of all sound and truly Imperial policy.  It was the more kind of you to write at a time when domestic trial has been lying heavily upon you.  Believe me,

    Very sincerely yours,

    W.E.  GLADSTONE

    Lady Russell to Lady Agatha Russell

    DUNROZEL, HASLEMERE, August 30, 1886

...  Our Sunday, mine especially, was a peaceful, lovely Sabbath—­mine especially because I didn’t go to any church built with hands, but held my silent, solitary worship in God’s own glorious temple, with no walls to limit my view, no lower roof than the blue heavens over my head.  The lawn, the green walk, the Sunday bench in the triangle, each and all seemed filled with holiness and prayer—­sadness and sorrow.  Visions of more than one beautiful past which those spots have known and which never can return, were there too; but the Eternal Love was around to hallow them....

    Lady Russell to Miss Buehler

    PEMBROKE LODGE, November 24, 1886