ore cheerful and gallant
spirit. She does not care to have us to dinner now; but we all see her
continually; I go perhaps every other day, and Mary nearly every day.'

His mother was to survive two years longer. Her strong constitution and
the loving care of the daughter who lived with her supported her beyond
the anticipation of her doctors. There are constant references to her
state in my brother's letters. The old serenity remained unchanged to
the last. She suffered no pain and was never made querulous by her
infirmities. Slowly and gradually she seemed to pass into a world of
dreams as the decay of her physical powers made the actual world more
indistinct and shadowy. The only real subject for regret was the strain
imposed upon the daughter who was tenderly nursing her, and doing what
could be done to soothe her passage through the last troubles she was to
suffer. It was as impossible to wish that things should be otherwise as
not to feel the profound pathos of the gentle close to long years of a
most gentle and beautiful life. Fitzjames felt what such a son should
feel for such a mother. It would be idle to try to put into explicit
words that under-current of melancholy and not the less elevating
thought which saddened and softened the minds of all her children. Her
children must be taken to include some who were children not by blood
but by reverent affection. She died peacefully and painlessly on
February 27, 1875. She was buried by the side of her husband and of two
little grandchildren, Fitzjames's infant daughter and son, who had died
before her.

I now turn to the work in which Fitzjames was absorbed almost
immediately after his return to England. He had again to take up his
profession. He was full of accumulated reflections made in India, which
he had not been able to discharge through the accustomed channel of
journalism during his tenure of office; and besides this he entertained
hopes, rather than any confident belief, that he would be able to induce
English statesmen to carry on in their own country the work of
codification, upon which he had been so energetically labouring in
India. Before his departure he had already been well known to many
distinguished contemporaries. But he came home with a decidedly higher
reputation. In the natural course of things, many of his contemporaries
had advanced in their different careers, and were becoming arbiters and
distributors of reputation. His Indian career had