Prime Ministers and Some Others: A Book of ReminiscencesRussell, George William Erskine
History
Prime Ministers and Some Others: A Book of Reminiscences
Russell, George William Erskine
Great Britain -- Biography
I must confess that I chiefly remember his outward characteristics--his
large, dyed, carefully brushed whiskers; his broad-shouldered figure,
which always seemed struggling to be upright; his huge and rather
distorted feet--"each foot, to describe it mathematically, was a
four-sided irregular figure"--his strong and comfortable seat on
the old white hack which carried him daily to the House of Commons.
Lord Granville described him to a nicety: "I saw him the other
night looking very well, but old, and wearing a green shade, which
he afterwards concealed. He looked like a retired old croupier
from Baden."
Having frequented the Gallery of the House of Commons, or the more
privileged seats "under the Gallery," from my days of knickerbockers,
I often heard Palmerston speak. I remember his abrupt, jerky, rather
"bow-wow"-like style, full of "hums" and "hahs"; and the sort of
good-tempered but unyielding banter with which he fobbed off an
inconvenient enquiry, or repressed the simple-minded ardour of
a Radical supporter.
Of course, a boy's attention was attracted rather by appearance and
manner than by the substance of a speech; so, for a frank estimate
of Palmerston's policy at the period which I am discussing, I turn
to Bishop Wilberforce (whom he had just refused to make Archbishop
of York).
"That wretched Pam seems to me to get worse and worse. There is
not a particle of veracity or noble feeling that I have ever been
able to trace in him. He manages the House of Commons by debauching
it, making all parties laugh at one another; the Tories at the
Liberals, by his defeating all Liberal measures; the Liberals at
the Tories, by their consciousness of getting everything that is to
be got in Church and State; and all at one another, by substituting
low ribaldry for argument, bad jokes for principle, and an openly
avowed, vainglorious, imbecile vanity as a panoply to guard himself
from the attacks of all thoughtful men."
But what I remember even more clearly than Palmers ton is appearance
or manner--perhaps because it did not end with his death--is the
estimation in which he was held by that "Sacred Circle of the
Great-Grandmotherhood" to which I myself belong.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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