anently in the hands of
a little oligarchy of Whig families, and that every office of profit
under the Crown was, as a matter of course, allotted to some member of
those favoured families. In proof of the latter statement, I learnt
that the first act of my uncle Lord John, as Prime Minister, had been
to appoint one of his brothers Sergeant-at-Arms of the House of
Commons, and to offer to another of his brothers, the Rev. Lord
Wriothesley Russell, the vacant Bishopric of Oxford. Much to the credit
of my clergyman-uncle, he declined the Bishopric, saying that he had
neither the eloquence nor the administrative ability necessary for so
high an office in the Church, and that he preferred to remain a plain
country parson in his little parish, of which, at the time of his
death, he had been Rector for fifty-six years. All of which only goes
to show what absurdly erroneous ideas a child, anxious to learn, may
pick up from listening to the conversation of his elders, even when one
of those elders happened to be Mr. Disraeli himself.

Another ex-Prime Minister who was often at our house was the fourth
Earl of Aberdeen, who had held office many times, and had been Prime
Minister during the Crimean War. He must have been a very old man then,
for he was born in 1784. I have no very distinct recollection of him.
Oddly enough, Lord Aberdeen was both my great-uncle and my
step-grandfather, for his first wife had been my grandfather's sister,
and after her death, he married my grandfather's widow, his two wives
thus being sisters-in-law. Judging by their portraits by Lawrence,
which hung round our dining-room, my great-grandfather, old Lord
Abercorn's sons and daughters must have been of singular and quite
unusual personal beauty. Not one of the five attained the age of
twenty-nine, all of them succumbing early to consumption. Lord Aberdeen
had a most unfortunate skin and complexion, and in addition he was
deeply pitted with small-pox. As a result his face looked exactly like
a slice of brown bread, and "Old Brown Bread" he was always called by
my elder brothers and sisters, who had but little love for him, for he
disliked young people, and always made the most disagreeable remarks he
could think of to them. I remember once being taken to see him at
Argyll House, Regent Street, on the site of which the "Palladium" now
stands. I recollect perfectly the ugly, gloomy house, and its uglier
and gloomier garden, but I have no remembrance of