." I have no more nonsense to tell you. I should like to
go to Paris in July or August, but can we? Let me know when you
will be there.

Your faithful

TRUSTY TOMKINS

[67] The Albert Hall.

A few weeks later he wrote again to Lady Minto: "Our Reform Bill is now
brought to that exact shape in which Bright put it in 1858, and which he
thought too large and democratic a change to be accepted by the moderate
Liberal party. However, nothing is too much for the swallow of our modern
Tories."

In August, 1867, Lord Russell's eldest daughter, Georgiana, married Mr.
Archibald Peel, [68] son of General Peel, and nephew of the statesman, Sir
Robert Peel.

[68] The marriage service was at Petersham, in the quaint old village
Church, hallowed by many sacred memories.

The daughters, who had now left the old home, were sadly missed, but
intimate and affectionate intercourse with them never ceased. Lady
Russell's own daughter, the youngest of three families--ten in all--thought
in her early childhood that they were all real brothers and sisters, a
striking proof of the harmonious happiness of the home. In November, 1867,
Lady Victoria Villiers wrote to Lady Russell: "How I long to make our home
as pure, as high in its tone and aims, as free from all that is low or even
useless for our children, as our dear home was to us."

On Lord Russell's birthday, August 18, 1867, Lady Russell wrote in her
diary:

My dear, dear husband's birthday. Each year, each day, makes me
feel more deeply all the wonderful goodness of God in giving me one
so noble, so gentle, so loving, to be my example, my happiness, my
stay. How often his strength makes me feel, but try to conquer, my
own weakness; how often his cheerfulness and calmness are a
reproach to my anxieties. Experience has not hardened but only
given him wisdom. Trials have taught him to feel for others; age
has deepened his religion of love. All that so often lowers
commoner natures has but raised his.

In February, 1868, Lord Derby resigned, owing to ill health. "With Lord
Derby [says Sir Spencer Walpole [69]] a whole race of statesmen
disappeared. He was the last of the Prime Ministers who had held high
office before the Reform Act of 1832; and power, on his fall, was to be
transferred to men not much younger in point of years, but whose characters
and opinions had been moulded by other influences. He was, moreover, the
last of