I have no doubt that my mother returned from her Vienna visit a more strongly convinced Conservative in politics than she had hitherto been. And it does not seem to me that the modification of her opinions in that direction, which was doubtless largely operated by conversation with the great Conservative statesman and his _alter ego_, the Princess, needs to be in any degree attributed to the "graciousness" of people in high position either male or female. Is it not very intelligible and very likely that such opinions, so set forth, as she from day to day heard them, should have honestly and legitimately influenced her own? But I think that I should be speaking, if perhaps presumptuously, yet truly, if I were to add that there was also one very far from great personage, whose influence in the same direction was greater than even that of Prince Metternich or of any other great folks whatever; and that was the son in daily and almost hourly communion and conversation with whom she lived. I also had begun life as a "Liberal," and was such in the days when Mr. Gladstone was a high Tory. But my mind had long been travelling in an inverse direction to his. And far too large a number of my contemporaries distinguished and undistinguished have been moving in the same direction for it to be at all necessary to say that most assuredly my slowly maturing convictions were neither generated nor fostered by any "graciousness" or other influence of dukes or duchesses or great people of any sort. That my mother's political ideas were in no degree "an affair of the heart," I will not say, and by no means regret not being able to say. But I cannot but assert that it is a great mistake to say that they were uninfluenced by "reasoning from causes," or that the movement of her mind in this respect was in any degree whatever due to the caresses which my brother imagines to have caused it. She was not a great or careful preserver of papers and letters, or I might have been able to print here very many communications from persons in whom the world feels an interest. Among her early and very dear friends was Mary Mitford.