Papa and Bill [12] came from the House of Lords quite delighted
    with Lord Melbourne’s speech in explanation of what has
    passed—­manner, matter, everything perfect.

[12] Her brother, Lord Melgund, afterwards third Earl of Minto.

Thus, within the week, the Whig Ministry had resigned and accepted office again:  this is what had happened.

On his return from Italy to take office Sir Robert Peel requested the Queen to change the ladies of her household, and on her refusal to do so, the Melbourne Ministry had come in again.  Their return to power has been generally considered a blunder, from the party point of view; but their action in this case was not the result of tactical calculations.  The young Queen was strange as yet to the throne, and she could not bear to be deprived of her personal friends.  When Peel made a change in her household the condition of accepting office, she turned to the Whigs, who felt they could not desert her.  “My dear Melbourne,” wrote Lord John, “I have seen Spencer, who says that we could not have done otherwise than we have done as gentlemen, but that bur difficulties with the Radicals are not diminished....”

They were, indeed, hard put to it to carry on the Government at all, and they only succeeded in passing their Education Bill by a majority of two.

On August 12th the Mintos were still kept in London.  “Oh for the boys and guns and dogs, a heathery moor, and a blue Scotch heaven above me!” she writes.  When they did get away home, they remained there until the beginning of the new year.  At home she seems to have been much happier.  She taught her young brothers and sisters, she visited her village friends, and rambled and read a great deal.  In short, it was Minto!—­all she found so hard to part from when marriage took her away.

Many of the extracts from the diaries quoted in this chapter must be read in the light of the reader’s own recollections of the process of getting used to life.  They show that if Lady Russell afterwards attained a happy confidence in action, she was not in youth without experience of bewilderment and doubts about herself.  Following one another quickly, these extracts may seem to imply that she was gloomy and self-centred during these years; but that was never the impression she made on others.  Like many at her age, when she wrote in a diary she dwelt most on the feelings about which she found it hardest to talk.  Her diary was not so much the mirror of the days as they passed as the repository of her unspoken confidences.  “Looked over my journals, with reflections,” she writes later; “inclined to burn them all.  It seems I have only written [on days] when I was not happy, which is very wrong—­as if I had forgotten to be grateful for happy ones.”

Mrs. Drummond, Lord John Russell’s stepdaughter (who was then Miss Adelaide Lister), has recorded, in a letter to Lady Agatha Russell, her recollections of the Minto family at that time.