Manin--_uomo antico_--"one of the ancient type"--one whom we
rarely see in our modern days of getting on in the world and
following the popular cry. I have never heard the phrase applied to
a lady, and, perhaps, _donna antica_ might be held to bear a
double sense. But we need some such phrase to describe the fine
quality of the spirit which lit up the whole nature of Frances
Countess Russell. She had within her that rare flame which we
attribute to the martyrs of our sacred and secular histories--that
power of inspiring those whom she impressed with the resolve to do
the right, to seek the truth, to defend the oppressed, at all cost,
and against all odds.

It has been my privilege to have listened to many men and to some
women who in various countries and in different causes have been
held to have exerted great influence, and to have forced ideas,
principles, and reforms on the men of their time. But I have
listened to none in our country or abroad who seemed to me to
inspire the spirit more purely with the desire to hold fast by the
right, to thrust aside the wrong, to be just, faithful,
considerate, and honourable, to feel for the fatherless and the
poor, and not to despise the humble and the meek. I know that all
my remaining term of life there will remain deeply engraven on my
memory all that she said, all that she felt, in the last
conversation I ever held with her at the very commencement of her
last fatal illness. Weak and suffering as she was, unable to rise
from her invalid chair, she asked me to come and tell her what I
knew, and to hear what she felt about the public crisis of that
time (I speak of the end of 1897). The storm of South Africa was
even then rising like a cloud no bigger than a man's hand out of
the southern seas. I listened to her: and her deep and thrilling
words of indignation, shame, pity, and honour sank into my mind, as
if they had been the last words of some pure and higher spirit that
was about to leave us, but would not leave us without words of
warning and exhortation to follow honour, to serve truth, to eschew
evil and to do good, to seek peace and ensue it. I knew well that I
was listening to her for the last time; for her life was visibly
ebbing away. But I listened to her as to one who was passing into a
world of greater permanence an