But I think that I should be speaking, if perhaps presumptuously, yet truly, if I were to add that there was also one very far from great personage, whose influence in the same direction was greater than even that of Prince Metternich or of any other great folks whatever; and that was the son in daily and almost hourly communion and conversation with whom she lived.  I also had begun life as a “Liberal,” and was such in the days when Mr. Gladstone was a high Tory.  But my mind had long been travelling in an inverse direction to his.  And far too large a number of my contemporaries distinguished and undistinguished have been moving in the same direction for it to be at all necessary to say that most assuredly my slowly maturing convictions were neither generated nor fostered by any “graciousness” or other influence of dukes or duchesses or great people of any sort.

That my mother’s political ideas were in no degree “an affair of the heart,” I will not say, and by no means regret not being able to say.  But I cannot but assert that it is a great mistake to say that they were uninfluenced by “reasoning from causes,” or that the movement of her mind in this respect was in any degree whatever due to the caresses which my brother imagines to have caused it.

She was not a great or careful preserver of papers and letters, or I might have been able to print here very many communications from persons in whom the world feels an interest.  Among her early and very dear friends was Mary Mitford.

I have a very vivid remembrance of the appearance of Mary Russell Mitford as I used to see her on the occasions of my visits to Reading, where my grandfather’s second wife and then widow was residing.  She was not corpulent, but her figure gave one the idea of almost cubical solidity.  She had a round and red full moon sort of face, from the ample forehead above which the hair was all dragged back and stowed away under a small and close-fitting cap, which surrounding her face increased the effect of full-blown rotundity.  But the grey eye and even the little snub nose were full of drollery and humour, and the lines about the generally somewhat closely shut mouth indicated unmistakable intellectual power.  There is a singular resemblance between her handwriting and that of my mother.  Very numerous letters must have passed between them.  But of all these I have been able to find but four.

On the 3rd of April, 1832, she writes from the “Three Mile Cross,” so familiar to many readers, as follows:—­

* * * * *

“My dear Mrs. Trollope,—­I thank you most sincerely for your very delightful book, as well as for its great kindness towards me; and I wish you joy from the bottom of my heart of the splendid success which has not merely attended but awaited its career—­a happy and I trust certain augury of your literary good fortune in every line which you may pursue.  I assure you that my political prejudices are by no