What my mother was I have already said enough to show, as far as my imperfect words can show it, in divers passages of these reminiscences.  She was the happiest natured person I ever knew—­happy in the intense power of enjoyment, happier still in the conscious exercise of the power of making others happy; and this continued to be the case till nearly the end.  During the last few years the bright lamp began to grow dim and gradually sink into the socket.  She suffered but little physically, but she lost her memory, and then gradually more and more the powers of her mind generally.  I have often thought that this perishing of the mind before the exceptionally healthy and well-constituted physical frame, in which it was housed, may have been due to the tremendous strain to which she was subjected during those terrible months at Bruges, when she was watching the dying bed of a much-loved son during the day, and, dieted on green tea and laudanum, was writing fiction most part of the night.  The cause, if such were the case, would have preceded the effect by some forty years; but whether it is on the cards to suppose that such an effect may have been produced after such a length of time, I have not physiological knowledge enough to tell.

She was, I think, to an exceptional degree surrounded by very many friends, mostly women, but including many men, at every period of her life.  But the circumstances of it caused the world of her intimates during her youth, her middle life, and her old age, to be to a great degree peopled by different figures.

She was during all her life full of, and fond of, fun; had an exquisite sense of humour; and at all times valued her friends and acquaintances more exclusively, I think, than most people do, for their intrinsic qualities, mainly those of heart, and, not so much perhaps intellect, accurately speaking, as brightness.  There is a passage in my brother’s Autobiography which grates upon my mind, and, I think, very signally fails to hit the mark.

He writes (vol. i. p. 28):—­“She loved society, affecting a somewhat Liberal role, and professing an emotional dislike to tyrants, which sprung from the wrongs of would-be regicides and the poverty of patriot exiles.  An Italian marquis who had escaped with only a second shirt from the clutches of some archduke whom he had wished to exterminate, or a French proletaire with distant ideas of sacrificing himself to the cause of liberty, were always welcome to the modest hospitality of her house.  In after years, when marquises of another caste had been gracious to her, she became a strong Tory, and thought that archduchesses were sweet.  But with her, politics were always an affair of the heart, as indeed were all her convictions.  Of reasoning from causes I think that she knew nothing.”