I wrote so much to your brother of all the Duke of Bedford said of the old statesman being of use to the young one, and the young statesman taking to the old one (words on which he rings the changes till he makes me sick), that I can’t write it all over again; but by dint of positively declining to understand, and by being so intensely stupid as to ask which Lord Stanley he meant (perhaps _he_ of Alderley), and by writing him short, savage notes in the intervals of the weekly luncheons he takes here, I hope I have rather enlightened that slightly damaged article--his mind. It is a good old mind, too, in its little bald shell; but Lord John had evidently persuaded him that new combination of parties was necessary, and that Lord Stanley was, as he always calls him, the young statesman of the age. William Russell has succeeded Lord John at Woburn, and had evidently snubbed the Duke about this alliance, as his tone was quite changed about it, and he was anxious to prove that the friendship began here. Your affectionate E. E. _Miss Eden to Lady Theresa Lewis._ ADMIRALTY, _Sunday_ [1851]. MY DEAREST THERESA, I may as well write a line while I can, just in the stages that intervene between the pains of my illness and the pains of my cure; the last being decidedly the worst and the most destructive; my courage has gone for pain. How are you and yours, and what do you hear from Dublin? I have heard nothing about them since they went. London is this week entirely empty; otherwise there has always been an allowance of a visitor a day--Lord Grey, Lord Palmerston, Lord Cowper, passing through, and so on; and while Lord Auckland and Fanny were at Bowood, my sister, Mrs. Colvile, abandoned in the handsomest manner her husband and children in the wilds of Eaton Place, and came and lived here. I was very unwell at the time, and she is the quietest and best nurse in the world. Poor thing! she well may be. The report of Lord Godolphin’s[545] marriage to Lady Laura gains ground, and though I feel it is not true, it is too amusing to dispute. Ditto, C. Greville’s to Mrs. H. Baring.[546] I see his stepchildren playfully jumping on his feet when gout is beginning. Henry Eden is so happy about his marriage, and so utterly oblivious of the fact that he is fifty, that I begin to think that is the best time for being in love. Miss Beresford has £20,000 down now, more hereafter; and as the attachment has lasted twelve years, only waiting for the cruel Uncle’s consent, which was wrung from him by Henry’s appointment to Woolwich, they ought to know what they are about, and luckily when they meet they seem to have liked each other better than ever. But twelve years is rather an awful gap....