One of the elder children in far-off days at Pembroke Lodge, Mrs. Warburton, Lord John's step-daughter, recalls wet days in the country, when her father would break the tedium of temporary imprisonment indoors by romping with his children. 'I have never forgotten his expression of horror when in a game of hide-and-seek he banged the door accidentally in my elder sister's face and we heard her fall. Looking back to the home life, its regularity always astonishes me. The daily walks, prayers, and meals regular and punctual as a rule.... He was shy and we were shy, but I think we spoke quite freely with him, and he seldom said more than "Foolish child" when we ventured on any startling views on things. Once I remember rousing his indignation when I gave out, with sententious priggishness, that the Duke of Wellington laboured under great difficulties in Spain caused by the "factious opposition at home;" that was beyond "Foolish child," but my discomforted distress was soon soothed by a pat on the cheek, and an amused twinkle in his kind eyes.' Lord Amberley, four days before his death, declared that he had all his life 'met with nothing but kindness and gentleness' from his father. He added: 'I do earnestly hope that at the end of his long and noble life he may be spared the pain of losing a son.' Mr. Rollo Russell says: 'My father was very fond of history, and I can remember his often turning back to Hume, Macaulay, Hallam, and other historical works. He read various books on the French Revolution with great interest. He had several classics always near him, such as Homer and Virgil; and he always carried about with him a small edition of Horace. Of Shakespeare he could repeat much, and knew the plays well, entering into and discussing the characters. He admired Milton very greatly and was fond of reading "Paradise Lost." He was very fond of several Italian and Spanish books, by the greatest authors of those countries. Of lighter reading, he admired most, I think, "Don Quixote," Sir Walter Scott's novels, Miss Evans' ("George Eliot") novels, Miss Austen's, and Dickens and Thackeray. Scott especially he loved to read over again. He told me he bought "Waverley" when it first came out, and was so interested in it that he sat up a great part of the night till he had finished it.' [Sidenote: THE FRIENDSHIP OF BOOKS] Lady Russell states that Grote's 'History of Greece' was one of the last books her husband read, and she adds: 'Many of his friends must have seen its volumes open before him on the desk of his blue armchair in his sitting-room at Pembroke Lodge in the last year or two of his life. It was often exchanged for Jowett's "Plato," in which he took great delight, and which he persevered in trying to read, when, alas! the worn-out brain refused to take in the meaning.'