just received pleases me much, for I find in it a high tone of moral rectitude, a noble feeling of devotion to your husband’s calling, an unselfish determination to fulfil your destiny, an abnegation of domestic comfort, a latent feeling of ambition tempered with resignation, such as becomes a woman, that do you the highest honour....  I think the crisis we are going through in England very alarming ... a frightful system of political immorality is stalking through the land—­the Democracy is triumphant, the Aristocracy is making a noble and last effort to hold its own, unfortunately in so bad, so unjust, so selfish, so stupid a cause, that it must fall covered with shame....  The hero of the day, Cobden, is a great man in his way, the type of an honest manufacturer, but for the moment all-powerful.  I am domiciled with your brother and sister, [27] under the same roof, dine daily at their hospitable table, sit over the fire and cose and prose with them, sometimes alone with your sister, who thinks and talks very like you, that is, not only well but very well.

    I am very affectionately yours,

    W.R.

P.S.—­You say it would be unworthy of John to pine for office.  I think the difficulties of a Prime Minister so great and the toil so irksome that the country ought to be full of gratitude to any man that will undertake it.  I am full of gratitude to Sir Robert Peel for having sacrificed his ease and enjoyment for the good of his country, and to enable us to sit in the shade under our own fig-trees.  Glory and gratitude to Peel.

[27] Lady Mary Abercromby.

    Lord John to Lady John Russell

    CHESHAM PLACE, February 15, 1846

I have been to St. Paul’s to-day.  Mr. Bennett enforced still further obedience to the Church, and what was strange, he said Papists and Dissenters were prevented by the prejudices of education from seeing the truth—­as if the same thing were not just as true of his own Church.  I do not see how it is possible to be out of the Roman Catholic pale and not use one’s own faculties on the interpretation of the Bible.  That tells us that our Saviour said, he who knew that to love God with all our soul and to love our neighbour as ourself were the two great commandments, was not far from the kingdom of God.  This surely can be known and even followed without a priest at all.

    Lady John to Lord John Russell

    MINTO, February 27, 1846

You seem to have had a very pleasant dinner at the Berrys, and I wish I had been at it.  I wonder sometimes whether the social enjoyments of life are for ever at an end for me:  and in my hopeful moods I plan all sorts of pleasant little teas at Chesham Place—­at home from nine to eleven on certain days, in an easy way, without smart dressing and preparation of any sort beyond a few candles and plenty of tea.