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She had, in addition, composed little plays with music, to be acted by the children, and I remember one in which my brother and I took part, the chief difficulty of the performance being to get me to sing the songs I had to sing in anything approaching their original tunes. I also recollect that after the performance which Princess Mary had attended, when we were mingling with the audience, I said "How do you do?" to her without recognizing her, and the next moment when I saw Lady Harcourt sweeping in a low curtsey was horrified to think how I had forgotten my manners. In poetry her principal attachment was for Byron, presumably a remnant of Victorian tradition, and I remember well that she used to read Childe Harold over every summer. Wordsworth, who was another favourite, seems more natural. In later years I induced her to read and rather insisted on Browning, and after a time she did admire some of him. She and my aunt were devoted to John Morley, both as a man and as an author, and were not troubled by the earlier days now almost forgotten, when he spelt God with a little g in the Pall Mall Gazette. Her active and intelligent mind had always made her take a great interest in politics, and my grandfather had always freely discussed his difficulties and his plans with her. Naturally as the wife of a Prime Minister she knew well all the outstanding political figures of that period. When one reflects that she was born in the year of the Battle of Waterloo, and that she well remembered making the journey to Scotland in grown-up life in her own carriage, one realizes how far back one is carried by her reminiscences.

My mother was also a great friend of John Morley, and I have come across this letter which she wrote him on the death of John Stuart Mill:

DEAR MR. MORLEY,

RAVENSCROFT, CHEPSTOw.

June 9, 73.

I have but just read your notice of Mr. Mill, and it is with tears in my eyes that I write a line to thank you, as one of his devoted followers, for the way you have expressed what so many of us feel but have not the power nor the opportunity of putting into words.

We saw a very great deal of him this year in London, and he was to have come here late in the summer. I lunched with him the eve of his departure. Every visit, every word one had with him made him dearer to one, and not only as a Teacher

but as the tenderest, youngest, most sympathizing friend shall we all have to mourn him as long as we live. Many thanks for what you wrote, I am so glad to see what we all felt so well put to the public, that they may have a glimpse of the heights of perfection to which the greatest free thinker and social reformer of the day could attain. I hope you yourself are better, we cannot spare good men, there is too much left to fight for, and the work of his followers is the truest tribute we can pay to his memory. Yours very truly,

KATE AMBERLEY.

Both Lord and Lady John were great friends of Queen Victoria, and this friendship continued unabated to the day of my grandmother's death. I recollect very dimly one famous occasion in April, 1874, when the Queen came to take tea at Pembroke Lodge, and I had the honour of being presented to her as she was sitting in state at her separate tea-table with her separate tea-pot and looking just like the familiar picture. I also remember one or two quaint stories about my grandmother's earlier association with her. My grandmother had the peculiar and unusual capacity of being able to waggle her ears like a dog, and this had intrigued the Queen, who suddenly called upon her one day in a large company to show off this accomplishment to an ambassador. My grandmother was so taken aback that she lost for a long time the power to move either ear, and only ultimately regained the power to move one, which she occasionally did for my edification. The Queen's habit of standing about for an interminable time after meals, during which, of course, nobody could sit, led to another incident when my grandmother, who was not feeling very well, caused the Queen to be asked if she might have permission to sit down. Her Majesty duly combining consideration for an old and faithful servant with a proper regard to her own dignity, said in a loud voice: "Lady Russell may sit down, Lady A and Lady B will stand in front of her." A very characteristic pronouncement!

This reminds me of another story of my grandfather at a Court Ball, when he was Prime Minister, where he was observed to spend the first part of the evening talking with great animation to the Duchess of A, and then suddenly to leave her side and sit down by the Duchess of B. My grandmother tackled him afterwards, and said: "Everyone was wondering why you got up so suddenly

E

and left the Duchess of A." "Oh," he replied, "because the fire was so hot, I could not stand it any longer." "I hope you told the Duchess of A," said my grandmother. "N-no, I don't think I did," he replied, "but I told the Duchess of B." It did not occur to him that he had made his confidence to the wrong woman of the two.

The usual routine of my life at P. L. at this time began with prayers in the morning, which all the servants attended, a Moody and Sankey hymn, a portion of scripture, and a prayer read by my grandmother from a volume of her own compiling. Breakfast, which all attended, a short interval, and then lessons till twelve. I then played about the grounds, chiefly by myself, and in the afternoon there would be a drive with my grandmother in the carriage, a walk with my Aunt Agatha to the school at Petersham, or by myself on some message. After dinner and until bedtime I was generally expected to read aloud for half an hour, often Shakespeare. When the reading consisted, as it sometimes did, of a few pages of a novel, I found it irritating, having always preferred to devour these lighter works at a sitting. I recollect that Mrs. Gaskell was a favourite. I was then sent to bed, and I think at this time I had abandoned my earlier habit of reading in bed, and went to sleep at once. There were many things I found irritating in the life at P. L., but most of all the constant questioning "Where have you been?" "What have you done?" "Who have you seen?"-all things which one would have told naturally and as a matter of course if one had been left alone, but which caused intense resentment to a person who had been as free and as trusted as I had, when asked in a tone which always implied that I had probably been doing something I shouldn't, or that I might have been better occupied, or that I had committed the incredible rashness of exposing myself to scarlet fever by daring to go down to Richmond Town to buy something I wanted for my electrical experiments. An additional irritation was the tone of voice in which conversation was generally conducted, a sort of hushed and pained undertone, as if one were in church with a corpse where some vulgar person had just committed the indiscretion of speaking in a natural voice. I do not suppose my Uncle Rollo for one moment realized, or if he had realized, could possibly have understood, how passionately I desired to kick him on the shins when he adopted this voice.

The sad thing about it was that I was pining for love, under

standing and companionship, and bubbling over with the exciting confidences of youth; and as often choked off by the hostile and suspicious way in which they were received. The most frequent and most maddening P. L. expression was that it was "so sad." My father's later life was "so sad": any attempt to draw the immaculate Bertie into mischief of the most innocent kind was "so sad" my unkind and wicked want of affection was "so sad": the way in which I failed to appreciate the love that surrounded me was "so sad." I had a permanent feeling that I was looked upon as a brand to be plucked from the burning, and nobody likes to be treated permanently as a brand. I felt much as Tony Weller felt towards the Shepherd, in fact I felt that I ought to be a brand to justify them in treating me like one. And yet looking back I can honestly avow that I never had a single thought or a single purpose which was not sane, reasonable, and even meritorious and natural to ebullient youth. But the iron entered into my soul, and I never entirely recovered my natural freedom and frankness.

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CHAPTER VIII

40 DOVER STREET

T school I could be reasonably happy in my own way, but there were also the holidays. Throughout the whole of my adolescence the one relief, the one escape, the one freedom from the oppression of P. L. was represented by 40 Dover Street. Over this house presided my other grandmother, Lady Stanley of Alderley; and its only other occupant was my maiden aunt, The Hon. Maude Stanley, who looked after her. Grandmamma, in the days when I first remember her, had a nasty little barking dog which used to rush out suddenly from beneath her chair and alarm me for my shins: my Aunt Maude had a cockatoo of which my chief recollection is the indecent cries of joy it used to give whenever I left the room. I am said to be very like Grandmamma in face, and I certainly think we were more or less alike in character. At any rate I was the only one of her numerous grandchildren who was not much afraid of her, and there was always great confidence and understanding between us. Born in 1807, she was of great age, and with her numerous and unruly family, and her life of fifty years in the great world, of great experience. She and my Aunt Maude did all that they could for the lonely orphan to give him a knowledge of people and things. When my grandmother died, in 1895, quite apart from the special sense of loss, I felt that the one woman in London with whom I most enjoyed conversing was gone.

P.L. was jealous of Dover Street, and many and many an invitation which Grandmamma sent for me was declined by my grandmother Russell on one trivial pretext or another, until the day when I could choose for myself. Almost from the first, however, it became a tradition that I should attend the Christmas Lectures for Juveniles at the Royal Institution in the next street, and although not permitted to spend the whole delicious fortnight there, several nights at Dover Street were of necessity involved. I well remember Tyndall who was at that time the Resident Pro