MINTO, August 10, 1853

You will feel a melancholy pang at the date of the place from which I write.  It is indeed very sorrowful to see Lord Minto and so many of his sons and daughters assembled to perform the last duties to her who was the life and comfort of them all....  The place is looking beautiful, and your mother’s garden was never so lovely.  It is pleasant in all these sorrows and trials to see a family so united in affection, and so totally without feelings or objects that partake of selfishness or ill-will.

The old poet Rogers, who had been attached to Lady John since her earliest days in London society, now wrote to her in her sorrow.  His note is worth preserving.  He was past his ninetieth year when he wrote, and it reveals a side of him which is lost sight of in the memoirs of the time, where he usually appears as saying many neat things, but few kind ones.  Mrs. Norton, in a letter to Hayward, gives an authentic picture of him at this time.  She begins by saying that no man ever seemed so important who did so little, even said so little: 

“His god was Harmony,” she wrote; “and over his life Harmony presided, sitting on a lukewarm cloud.  He was not the ’poet, sage, and philosopher’ people expected to find he was, but a man in whom the tastes (rare fact!) preponderated over the passions; who defrayed the expenses of his tastes as other men make outlay for the gratification of their passions; all within the limit of reason.

“...  He was the very embodiment of quiet, from his voice to the last harmonious little picture that hung in his hushed room, and a curious figure he seemed—­an elegant pale watch-tower, showing for ever what a quiet port literature and the fine arts might offer, in an age of ‘progress,’ when every one is tossing, struggling, wrecking, and foundering on a sea of commercial speculation or political adventure; when people fight over pictures, and if a man does buy a picture, it is with the burning desire to prove it is a Raphael to his yielding enemies, rather than to point it out with a slow white finger to his breakfasting friends.”

    Mr. Samuel Rogers to Lady John Russell

    August 13, 1853

MY DEAR FRIEND,—­May I break in upon you to say how much you have been in my thoughts for the last fortnight?  But I was unwilling to interrupt you at such a moment when you must have been so much engaged.

May He who has made us and alone knows what is best for us support you under your great affliction.  Again and again have I taken up my poor pen, but in vain, and I have only to pray that God may bless you and yours wherever you go.

    Ever most affectionately yours,

    SAMUEL ROGERS

In the autumn of 1853 Lord John took his family up to Roseneath, in Scotland, which had been lent them by the Duke of Argyll.  They had been there some weeks, occasionally making short cruises in the Seamew, which the Commission of Inland Revenue had placed at their disposal, when threatening complications in the East compelled Lord John to return to London.  The peace of thirty-eight years was nearly at an end.