capital article of friendships.

Not many months later (June 1862) he had to write to Mr. Gordon, "We are
all sorely smitten by Canning's death," whose fame, he said, would "bear
the scrutinising judgment of posterity, under whose keen eye so many
illusions are doomed to fade away."(68)

(M30) In the December of 1861 died the Prince Consort. His last
communication to Mr. Gladstone was a letter (Nov. 19) proposing to
recommend him as an elder brother of the Trinity House in place of Graham.
Of Mr. Gladstone's first interview with the Queen after her bereavement,
Dean Wellesley wrote to him that she was greatly touched by his evidence
of sympathy. "She saw how much you felt for her, and the mind of a person
in such deep affliction is keenly sensitive and observant. Of all her
ministers, she seemed to me to think that you had most entered into her
sorrows, and she dwelt especially upon the manner in which you had parted
from her." To the Duchess of Sutherland Mr. Gladstone writes:--

_March 20, 1862._--I find I must go out at four exactly. In any
case I do not like to trust to chance your knowing or not knowing
what befell me yesterday. Your advice was excellent. I was really
bewildered, but that all vanished when the Queen came in and kept
my hand a moment. All was beautiful, simple, noble, touching to
the very last degree. It was a meeting, for me, to be remembered.
I need only report the first and last words of the personal part
of the conversation. The first (after a quarter of an hour upon
affairs) was (putting down her head and struggling) "the nation
has been very good to me in my time of sorrow"; and the last, "I
earnestly pray it may be long before you are parted from one
another."(69)

In the spring he took occasion at Manchester to pronounce a fine panegyric
on the Prince,(70) for which the Queen thanked him in a letter of
passionate desolation, too sacred in the anguish of its emotion to be
printed here. "Every source of interest or pleasure," she concludes,
"causes now the acutest pain. Mrs. Gladstone, who, the Queen knows, is a
most tender wife, may in a faint manner picture to herself what the Queen
suffers." Mr. Gladstone replies:--

It may not be impertinent in him to assure your Majesty that all
the words to which your Majesty refers were received with deep
emotion by the whole of a very large assembly, who appeared to
feel both