But what I remember even more clearly than Palmers ton is appearance or manner—­perhaps because it did not end with his death—­is the estimation in which he was held by that “Sacred Circle of the Great-Grandmotherhood” to which I myself belong.

In the first place, it was always asserted, with emphasis and even with acrimony, that he was not a Whig.  Gladstone, who did not much like Whiggery, though he often used Whigs, laid it down that “to be a Whig a man must be a born Whig,” and I believe that the doctrine is absolutely sound.  But Palmerston was born and bred a Tory, and from 1807 to 1830 held office in Tory Administrations.  The remaining thirty-five years of his life he spent, for the most part, in Whig Administrations, but a Whig he was not.  The one thing in the world which he loved supremely was power, and, as long as this was secured, he did not trouble himself much about the political complexion of his associates.  “Palmerston does not care how much dirt he eats, so long as it is gilded dirt;” and, if gilded dirt be the right description of office procured by flexible politics, Palmerston ate, in his long career, an extraordinary amount of it.

Then, again, I remember that the Whigs thought Palmerston very vulgar.  The newspapers always spoke of him as an aristocrat, but the Whigs knew better.  He had been, in all senses of the word, a man of fashion; he had won the nickname of “Cupid,” and had figured, far beyond the term of youth, in a raffish kind of smart society which the Whigs regarded with a mixture of contempt and horror.  His bearing towards the Queen, who abhorred him—­not without good reason—­was considered to be lamentably lacking in that ceremonious respect for the Crown which the Whigs always maintained even when they were dethroning Kings.  Disraeli likened his manner to that of “a favourite footman on easy terms with his mistress,” and one who was in official relations with him wrote:  “He left on my recollection the impression of a strong character, with an intellect with a coarse vein in it, verging sometimes on brutality, and of a mind little exercised on subjects of thought beyond the immediate interests of public and private life, little cultivated, and drawing its stores, not from reading but from experience, and long and varied intercourse with men and women.”

Having come rather late in life to the chief place in politics, Palmerston kept it to the end.  He was an indomitable fighter, and had extraordinary health.  At the opening of the Session of 1865 he gave the customary Full-Dress Dinner, and Mr. Speaker Denison,[*] who sat beside him, made this curious memorandum of his performance at table:  “He ate two plates of turtle soup; he was then served very amply to cod and oyster sauce; he then took a pate; afterwards he was helped to two very greasy-looking entrees; he then despatched a plate of roast mutton; there then appeared before him the largest, and to my mind the hardest, slice of ham that ever figured