in blessings of civilisation and society without encumbering them with petty etiquettes and fashions and forms which deprive them of half their value? Human nature strives and struggles and gives life itself for political freedom, while it forges social chains and fetters for itself.” One day Baroness Bunsen would drive with the Russells from their London house in Chesham Place to Kew, make the tour of the gardens and hothouses, and then go to Pembroke Lodge to lunch, where the other guests included the Duke of Wellington, the Duc de Broglie, Lord and Lady Palmerston, and Lord Lansdowne. Indeed, the list of their guests at different times would fill several pages: Thiers and Garibaldi, Baron and Baroness Bunsen, Macaulay, Froude and Lecky, Thackeray and Dickens, Thomas Moore and Rogers, Tennyson and Browning, Mrs. Beecher Stowe, Longfellow and Lowell, Sir Richard Owen, John Tyndall and Herbert Spencer, Frederic Harrison and Justin McCarthy, Sydney Smith, Dean Stanley, and Mr. Stopford Brooke--every shade of opinion, every type of mind, was at one time or another represented. It will be clear that Lady John was never at any period of her life a leader of political society in the sense in which Lady Palmerston was. Lady John had neither the temperament, the inclination, nor the health required for such a rôle in the world of politics. Some are of opinion that Lord John Russell’s position as a statesman suffered, that he allowed himself to be too much absorbed by his domestic affairs, and that the illnesses of his wife and the care of his young family weighed too heavily upon him. This is as it may be, but the ideal domestic life of the Russells did not prevent a perfect sympathy and understanding between husband and wife in the larger affairs in which the great statesman was engaged. Lady John possessed his fullest confidence, and shared in all his hopes of progress and improvement. She could, on occasion, give him shrewd advice. As regards her own personal attitude to politics, she cared much more for the great questions of the day themselves than for the details and personalities belonging to them. She much disliked the conversation of those whom she dubbed the “regular hardened lady politicians,” who were chiefly concerned with such details and personalities, and quickly lost sight of the great problems themselves. Lady John preferred the humdrum domestic talk of ordinary womenkind. But she was not wholly condemned to endure the weariness of political discussion by the wrong people in the wrong way, or to listen to domestic chatter. Opportunities of discussing pleasanter topics often occurred. Her sympathetic charm, her receptive mind, her intellectual equipment, enabled her to gather round her friends and acquaintances of a kind that almost realised the ideal of social intercourse. She did not, as is a common practice with hostesses occupying a prominent position in society, issue an invitation to a