F.R.

[111] Lady Russell had written in 1857 to her father about Minto:  “I can well imagine the loveliness of that loveliest and dearest of places.  There is now to us all a holy beauty in every tree and flower, in rock and river and hill that ought to do us good.”  Later, in a letter to her sister, Lady Elizabeth Romilly, she writes of “the Minto of old days, that happiest and most perfect home that children ever had.”

In 1889 the “Life of Lord John Russell” by Mr. Spencer Walpole, was published.

    Mr. Gladstone to Lady Russell

    HAWARDEN CASTLE, CHESTER, October 30, 1889

MY DEAR LADY RUSSELL,—­The week which has elapsed since I received from Mr. Walpole’s kindness a copy of his biography has been with me a busy one; but I have now completed a careful perusal of the first volume.  I cannot help writing to congratulate you on its appearance.  It presents a beautiful and a noble picture.  Having so long admired and loved your husband (and the political characters which attract love are not very numerous), I now, with the fuller knowledge of an early period which this volume gives me, both admire and love him more.  Your own personal share in the delineation is enviable.  And the biographer more than vindicates the wisdom of your choice; his work is capital, but it could not have been achieved except with material of the first order.  O for his aid in the present struggle, which, however, is proceeding to our heart’s content.  Believe me always most sincerely yours, W.E.  GLADSTONE

A little later Mr. Gladstone sent Lady Russell a proof copy of an article by him on the Melbourne Ministry, [112] from which the following passages are here quoted: 

...  He [Lord John Russell] brought into public life, and he carried through it unimpaired, the qualities which ennoble manhood—­truth, justice, fortitude, self-denial, a fund of genuine indignation against wrong, and an inexhaustible sympathy with human suffering....  With a slender store of physical power, his life was a daily assertion of the superiority of the spirit to the flesh.  With the warmest domestic affections, and the keen susceptibilities of sufferings they entail, he never failed to rally under sorrow to the call of public duty.  There were no bounds to the prowess or the fellow-feeling with which he would fling himself into the breach on behalf of a belaboured colleague; ... in 1852 an attack upon Lord Clarendon’s conduct as Viceroy of Ireland stirred all the depths of his nature, and he replied in a series of the noblest fighting passages which I have ever heard spoken in Parliament ...  At the head of all these qualities stands the moral element.  I do not recollect or know the time in our own history when the two great parties in the House of Commons have been led by men who so truly and so largely as Lord John Russell and Sir Robert Peel identified political with personal morality.  W.E.  GLADSTONE

[112] Nineteenth Century, January, 1890.