One of his most characteristic traits was his voice, which had what, in the satirical writings of the last century, used to be called “an aristocratic drawl,” and his pronunciation was archaic.  Like other high-bred people of his time, he talked of “cowcumbers” and “laylocks”; called a woman an “oo’man,” and was much “obleeged” where a degenerate race is content to be “obliged.”

The frigidity of his address and the seeming stiffness of his manner were really due to an innate and incurable shyness, but they produced, even among people who ought to have known him better, a totally erroneous impression of his character and temperament.

In the small social arts, which are so valuable an equipment for a political leader, he was indeed deficient.  He had no memory for faces, and was painfully apt to ignore his political supporters when he met them outside the walls of Parliament; and this inability to remember faces was allied with a curious artlessness which made it impossible for him to feign a cordiality he did not feel.  In his last illness he said:  “I have seemed cold to my friends, but it was not in my heart.”  The friends needed no such assurance, for in private life he was not only gentle, affectionate, and tender to an unusual degree, but full of fun and playfulness, a genial host and an admirable talker.  The great Lord Dufferin, a consummate judge of such matters, said:  “His conversation was too delightful, full of anecdote; but then his anecdotes were not like those told by the ordinary raconteur, and were simply reminiscences of his own personal experience and intercourse with other distinguished men.”

When Lord Palmerston died, The Times was in its zenith, and its editor, J. T. Delane, had long been used to “shape the whispers” of Downing Street.  Lord Russell resented journalistic dictation.  “I know,” he said, “that Mr. Delane is very angry because I did not kiss his hand instead of the Queen’s” The Times became hostile, and a competent critic remarked:” 

“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.”

Of Lord Russell’s political consistency I have already spoken; and it was most conspicuously displayed in his lifelong zeal for the extension of the suffrage.  He had begun his political activities by a successful attack on the rottenest of rotten boroughs; the enfranchisement of the Middle Class was the triumph of his middle life.  As years advanced his zeal showed no abatement; again and again he returned to the charge, though amidst the most discouraging circumstances; and when, in his old age, he became Prime Minister for the second time, the first task to which he set his hand was so to extend the suffrage as to include “the best of the working classes.”