ke Lodge, and impressed Lady Russell by his gentle and
spiritual nature; and Lowell was one of her most agreeable guests. With Sir
Henry Taylor, whose "Philip van Artevelde" she admired, the intercourse
was, from her youth to old age, intimate and affectionate.

Mr. Lecky, a faithful friend, gave a picture of the society at Pembroke
Lodge, which may be quoted here:

For some years after Lord Russell's retirement from ministerial life he
gathered around him at Pembroke Lodge a society that could hardly be
equalled--certainly not surpassed--in England. In the summer Sunday
afternoons there might be seen beneath the shade of those majestic oaks
nearly all that was distinguished in English politics, and much that was
distinguished in English literature, and few eminent foreigners visited
England without making a pilgrimage to the old statesman. [99]

[99] "Life of Lord John Russell," by Stuart J. Reid, p. 351.

Mr. Frederic Harrison was one of Lady Russell's best friends in the last
years of her life, and her keen interest in the Irish Question brought her
into close and intimate intercourse with Mr. Justin McCarthy, who knew her
so well in these days of busy and sequestered old age that his
recollections, given in the last chapter of this volume, are valuable.

Among the men of science she knew best were Sir Richard Owen, a near
neighbour in Richmond Park, Sir Joseph Hooker, and Professor Tyndall, one
of the most genial and delightful of her guests.

There is a passage in Sir Henry Taylor's autobiography which speaks of her
in earlier times, but it expresses an impression she made till her death on
many who met her:

I have been rather social lately, ... and went to a party at Lord John
Russell's, where I met the Archbishop of York.... A better meeting was with
Lady Lotty Elliot, the one of the Minto Elliots who is now about the age
that her elder sisters were when I first knew them some sixteen or eighteen
years ago.... They are a fine set of girls and women, those Minto Elliots,
full of literature and poetry and nature; and Lady John, whom I knew best
in former days, is still very attractive to me; and now that she is
relieved from the social toils of a First Minister's wife, I mean to renew
and improve my relations with her, if she has no objection.... She is very
interesting to me, as having kept herself pure from the world with a fresh
and natural and not ungifted mind in the world's most crowded ways. I
recolle