very effort made
by knowledge, benevolence, and enlightened purpose for the benefit of
humanity. She had evidently also a strong desire to add to her own large
stock of information, and she appears to have felt that whenever she came
into converse with any fellow-being she was in communication with one who
could tell her something which she did not already know.

In this characteristic she reminded me strongly of William Ewart Gladstone.

There is, or there used to be, a common impression throughout many social
circles in this country, that when Gladstone in private was the centre of
any company, he generally contrived to keep most of the talk to himself.
This always seemed to me an entire misconception, for I had many
opportunities of observing that Gladstone in social companionship seemed
much more anxious to get some new ideas from those around him than to pour
out to them from his own treasures of information.

Lady Russell loved to draw forth from the artist something about his art,
from the scholar something about his books, to compare the ideas of the
politician with her own, to lead the traveller into accounts of his
travels, to get from the scientific student some of his experiences in this
or that domain of science, and from those who visited the poor some
suggestions which might serve her during her constant work in the same
direction.

Even on subjects concerning which the greatest and sharpest divisions of
opinion might naturally arise--political questions, for instance--Lady
Russell seemed as much interested in listening to the clear exposition and
defence of a political opponent's views as she might have been in the
cordial exchange of sympathetic and encouraging opinions. When I first
began to make one of Lady Russell's frequent visitors, there was, of
course, between us a natural sympathy of political opinion which was made
all the stronger because of momentous events that had lately passed, or
were then passing, in the world around.

The great Civil War in the North American States had come to an end many
years before I began to visit Lady Russell at her home, and I need hardly
remind my readers that by far the larger proportion of what we call
"society" in England had given its sympathies entirely to the cause of the
South, and had firmly maintained, almost to the very end, that the South
was destined to have a complete victory over its opponents. Lady Russell
gave her sympathies to the side of th