s of pecuniary interest, his strong and tenacious
sense of the dignity of his office, and his thoroughly frank,
resolute, and manly character. These few words, if they be a
feeble, yet I assure you are also a genuine, tribute to a memory
which I trust will long be cherished. Earnestly anxious that you
may have every consolation in your heavy bereavement.

_To Cardinal Manning._

_April 19._--I thank you much for your kind note, though I am sorry
to have given you the trouble of writing it. Both of us have much
to be thankful for in the way of health, but I should have, hoped
that your extremely spare living would have saved you from the
action of anything like gouty tendencies. As for myself, I can in
no way understand how it is that for a full half century I have
been permitted and enabled to resist a pressure of special
liabilities attaching to my path of life, to which so many have
given way. I am left as a solitary, surviving all his compeers.
But I trust it may not be long ere I escape into some position
better suited to declining years.

_To Sir W. V. Harcourt._

_April 27._--A separate line to thank you for your more than kind
words about my rather Alexandrine speech last night; as to which I
can only admit that it contained one fine passage--six lines in
length.(69) Your "instincts" of kindliness in all personal matters
are known to all the world. I should be glad, on selfish grounds,
if I could feel sure that they had not a little warped your
judicial faculty for the moment. But this misgiving abates nothing
from my grateful acknowledgment.

An application was made to him on behalf of a member of the opposite party
for a political pension, and here is his reply, to which it may be added
that ten years later he had come rather strongly to the view that
political pensions should be abolished, and he was only deterred from
trying to carry out his view by the reminder from younger ministers, not
themselves applicants nor ever likely to be, that it would hardly be a
gracious thing to cut off benefactions at a time when the bestowal of them
was passing away from him, though he had used them freely while that
bestowal was within his reach.

_Political Pensions._

_July 4, 1883._--You are probably aware that during the fifty years
which have passed since the system of political and civil pensi