As the memoir of Mrs. Gladstone in this volume amply proves, a wife’s influence can keep her husband in power when he himself would be glad to relinquish it; and it has been said over and over again, by those in a position to judge, that had Lady Rosebery lived, Lord Rosebery’s political career would have been very different. In every case in which we have the published letters of the husbands to the wives here commemorated, and wherever also we have been privileged to see unpublished letters of the kind, we realise how the wife was the confidante of all details concerning the high matters of State in which the husband was interested. The memoir of Lady Palmerston well brings out the important use a clever woman could make of such information, and it is quite certain that outside the Cabinet and the great Government Departments no one knew more about what was going on in the world than the wives of the Prime Ministers. A looker-on can see more of the game than one actively engaged in it, and a statesman’s wife in the Victorian age was sufficiently removed from the excitement of the arena to be able to bring calm and reasoned judgment to bear on the issues involved. The wives of Lord Melbourne,[1] Lord Aberdeen,[2] and Lord Rosebery[3] died before their husbands actually attained the Premiership; therefore they can scarcely be logically called wives of Prime Ministers. But it has been thought well to include a memoir of Lady Caroline Lamb, because the facts of her picturesque and agitated career are not accessible in any one complete account, and because it throws a good deal of light on the social and domestic aspects of political life in the early nineteenth century.