Listening, as a child will do, to the conversation of his elders, I derived the most grotesquely false ideas as to the Whigs and their traditional policy.  I gathered that, with their tongues in their cheeks, they advocated measures in which they did not themselves believe, should they think that by so doing they would be able to enhance their popularity and maintain themselves in office:  that, in order to extricate themselves from some present difficulty, they were always prepared to mortgage the future recklessly, quite regardless of the ultimate consequences:  that whilst professing the most liberal principles, they were absurdly exclusive in their private lives, not consorting with all and sundry as we poor Tories did:  that convictions mattered less than office:  that in fact nothing much mattered, provided that the government of the country remained permanently in the hands of a little oligarchy of Whig families, and that every office of profit under the Crown was, as a matter of course, allotted to some member of those favoured families.  In proof of the latter statement, I learnt that the first act of my uncle Lord John, as Prime Minister, had been to appoint one of his brothers Sergeant-at-Arms of the House of Commons, and to offer to another of his brothers, the Rev. Lord Wriothesley Russell, the vacant Bishopric of Oxford.  Much to the credit of my clergyman-uncle, he declined the Bishopric, saying that he had neither the eloquence nor the administrative ability necessary for so high an office in the Church, and that he preferred to remain a plain country parson in his little parish, of which, at the time of his death, he had been Rector for fifty-six years.  All of which only goes to show what absurdly erroneous ideas a child, anxious to learn, may pick up from listening to the conversation of his elders, even when one of those elders happened to be Mr. Disraeli himself.

Another ex-Prime Minister who was often at our house was the fourth Earl of Aberdeen, who had held office many times, and had been Prime Minister during the Crimean War.  He must have been a very old man then, for he was born in 1784.  I have no very distinct recollection of him.  Oddly enough, Lord Aberdeen was both my great-uncle and my step-grandfather, for his first wife had been my grandfather’s sister, and after her death, he married my grandfather’s widow, his two wives thus being sisters-in-law.  Judging by their portraits by Lawrence, which hung round our dining-room, my great-grandfather, old Lord Abercorn’s sons and daughters must have been of singular and quite unusual personal beauty.  Not one of the five attained the age of twenty-nine, all of them succumbing early to consumption.  Lord Aberdeen had a most unfortunate skin and complexion, and in addition he was deeply pitted with small-pox.  As a result his face looked exactly like a slice of brown bread, and “Old Brown Bread” he was always called by my elder brothers and sisters, who had but little love for him, for he disliked young