t interest you as they
do me, yet still a letter is always a pleasant thing to receive,
even only that one may have the satisfaction of looking at the
Queen's head and breaking the seal.

The next entry from Lady John's Diary is dated October 9, 1849.

After tea John told me that he had informed the Cabinet of his plan
for the extension of the suffrage--to be proposed next session. All
looked grave. Sir Charles Wood and Lord Lansdowne expressed some
alarm.... To grant an increase of weight to the people of this
country when revolutions are taking place on all sides, when a
timid Ministry would rather seek to diminish that which they
already have, is to show a noble trust in them, of which I believe
they will nobly prove themselves worthy.

Lord John's determination to carry through this measure himself, rather
than to leave it in the hands of others, was afterwards the cause of the
first defeat of the Whig Government.

_Lady John Russell to Lady Mary Abercromby_

LONDON, _February_ 19, 1850

The weeks are galloping past so much faster even than usual that
there is no keeping pace with them.

I neither read, write, teach, learn, nor do anything--unless indeed
revising visiting books and writing invitations is to be called
something. I want to be with my Mama, to be with my husband, to be
with my children, to be with friends, and to be alone, all at the
same time. I want to read everything, and to write to everybody,
and to walk everywhere, in no time at all. And what is the result?
Why, that I lose the very _power_ not only of _doing_, but
of _thinking_, to a degree that makes me seriously uneasy and
unfits me to be a companion to anybody older or wiser than Wee-wee,
or Baby, whose capacities exactly suit mine. All this sounds as if
I led a life of bustle, which I do _not_--but it is _too
full,_ and there is an end of it. I dare say it is mistaken
vanity to suppose that if it was emptier I should do anything
worthier of record in the political, literary, or educational
line--and at all events it would be hard to find a happier or, I
trust, more thankful heart than mine, my troubles being in fact the
result of many blessings.

The next session opened with the Greek crisis, which Greville described as
"the worst scrape into which Palmerston has ever got himself and his
colleagues. The di