y brother's _Autobiography_ which grates upon my mind,
and, I think, very signally fails to hit the mark.

He writes (vol. i. p. 28):--"She loved society, affecting a somewhat
Liberal _role_, and professing an emotional dislike to tyrants, which
sprung from the wrongs of would-be regicides and the poverty of
patriot exiles. An Italian marquis who had escaped with only a second
shirt from the clutches of some archduke whom he had wished to
exterminate, or a French _proletaire_ with distant ideas of
sacrificing himself to the cause of liberty, were always welcome to
the modest hospitality of her house. In after years, when marquises of
another caste had been gracious to her, she became a strong Tory, and
thought that archduchesses were sweet. But with her, politics were
always an affair of the heart, as indeed were all her convictions. Of
reasoning from causes I think that she knew nothing."

Now there is hardly a word of this in which Anthony is not more
or less mistaken; and that simply because he had not adequate
opportunities for close observation. The affection which subsisted
between my mother and my brother Anthony was from the beginning to the
end of their lives as tender and as warm as ever existed between a
mother and son. Indeed I remember that in the old days of our youth
we used to consider Anthony the Benjamin. But from the time that he
became a clerk in the Post Office to her death, he and my mother were
never together but as visitors during the limited period of a visit.
From the time that I resigned my position at Birmingham to the time
of her death, I was uninterruptedly an inmate of her house, or she of
mine. And I think that I knew her, as few sons know their mothers.

No regicide, would-be or other, ever darkened her doors. No French
_proletaire_, or other French political refugee was ever among her
guests. She never was acquainted with any Italian marquis who had
escaped in any degree of distress from poverty. With General Pepe she
was intimate for years. But of him the world knows enough to perceive
that my brother cannot have alluded to him. And I recollect no other
marquis. It is very true that in the old Keppel Street and Harrow days
several Italian exiles, and I think some Spaniards, used to be her
occasional guests. This had come to pass by means of her intimacy with
Lady Dyer, the wife and subsequently widow of Sir Thomas Dyer, whose
years of foreign service had interested him and her in man