It must be admitted that in some of the small social arts which are so valuable an equipment for a political leader Lord John was funnily deficient.  He had no memory for faces, and was painfully apt to ignore his political followers when he met them beyond the walls of Parliament.  Once, staying in a Scotch country-house, he found himself thrown with young Lord D——­, now Earl of S——.  He liked the young man’s conversation, and was pleased to find that he was a Whig.  When the party broke up, Lord John conquered his shyness sufficiently to say to his new friend, “Well, Lord D——­, I am very glad to have made your acquaintance, and now you must come into the House of Commons and support me there.”  “I have been doing that for the last ten years, Lord John,” was the reply of the gratified follower.

This inability to remember faces was allied in Lord John with a curious artlessness of disposition which made it impossible for him to feign a cordiality he did not feel.  Once, at a concert at Buckingham Palace, he was seen to get up suddenly, turn his back on the Duchess of Sutherland, by whom he had been sitting, walk to the remotest part of the room, and sit down by the Duchess of Inverness.  When questioned afterwards as to the cause of his unceremonious move, which had the look of a quarrel, he said, “I could not have sate any longer by that great fire; I should have fainted.”

“Oh, that was a very good reason for moving; but I hope you told the Duchess of Sutherland why you left her.”

“Well—­no; I don’t think I did that.  But I told the Duchess of Inverness why I came and sate by her!”

Thus were opportunities of paying harmless compliments recklessly thrown away.

It was once remarked by a competent critic that “there have been Ministers who knew the springs of that public opinion which is delivered ready digested to the nation every morning, and who have not scrupled to work them for their own diurnal glorification, even although the recoil might injure their colleagues.  But Lord Russell has never bowed the knee to the potentates of the Press; he has offered no sacrifice of invitations to social editors; and social editors have accordingly failed to discover the merits of a statesman who so little appreciated them, until they have almost made the nation forget the services that Lord Russell has so faithfully and courageously rendered.”

Be this as it may, there is no doubt that the old Whig statesman lacked those gifts or arts which make a man widely popular in a large society of superficial acquaintances.  On his deathbed he said with touching pathos, “I have seemed cold to my friends, but it was not in my heart.”  The friends needed no such assurance.  He was the idol of those who were most closely associated with him by the ties of blood or duty.  Even to people outside the innermost circle of intimacy there was something peculiarly attractive in his singular mixture of gentleness and