was incapable yesterday of expressing to you
how much I appreciate your considerate sympathy. My wife had
always a strong personal regard for you, and being of a vivid and
original character, she could comprehend and value your great
gifts and qualities. There is a ray of hope under this roof since
the last four and twenty hours: round your hearth, I trust, health
and happiness will be ever present.--Yours sincerely, B. DISRAELI.

Six years later when Lady Beaconsfield died, Mr. Gladstone wrote (Jan. 19,
1873):--

DEAR MR. DISRAELI,--My reluctance to intrude on the sacredness and
freshness of your sorrow may now, I think, properly give way to a
yet stronger reluctance to forego adding our small but very
sincere tribute of sympathy to those abundant manifestations of it
which have been yielded in so many forms. You and I were, as I
believe, married in the same year. It has been permitted to both
of us to enjoy a priceless boon through a third of a century.
Spared myself the blow which has fallen on you, I can form some
conception of what it must have been and must be. I do not presume
to offer you the consolation which you will seek from another and
higher quarter. I offer only the assurance which all who know you,
and all who knew Lady Beaconsfield, and especially those among
them who like myself enjoyed for a length of time her marked,
though unmerited regard, may perhaps tender without impropriety,
the assurance that in this trying hour they feel deeply for you
and with you.--Believe me, sincerely yours,

W. E. GLADSTONE.

_Hughenden Manor, Jan. 24, 1873._--DEAR MR. GLADSTONE,--I am much
touched by your kind words in my great sorrow. I trust, I
earnestly trust, that you may be spared a similar affliction.
Marriage is the greatest earthly happiness, when founded on
complete sympathy. That hallowed lot was mine, and for a moiety of
my existence; and I know it is yours.--With sincere regard, D.

A last note, with the quavering pen-strokes of old age (Nov. 6, 1888),
comes from the hand, soon to grow cold, of one who had led so strange a
revolution, and had stood for so much in the movement of things that to
Mr. Gladstone were supreme:--

It is a great kindness and compliment your wishing to see me. I
have known and admired you so long. But I cannot write nor talk
nor walk, and hop