A FAMOUS OLD LADY.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1212, 24 May 1895, Page 14

A FAMOUS OLD LADY.

The London correspondent of the Argus writes as follows —The most notable victim to the severe weather is the Dowager Lady Stanley of Alderley. She was 88 years of age, but refused to retreat to the Riviera, as her great friend, Mr Gladstone, and the new county gentry do. The New Woman has recently announced that it is a physiological mistake for a female to marry before 25 years of age. Lady Stanley was married at 18. She had ten children, leaves eighty grandchildren, and remained till the last one of the most beautiful old women imaginable, handsomer and younger looking than any of her daughters. Her father was Viscount Dillon, I fancy the one who was prosecuted, some forty years ago, for cruelty to animals. He had a theory that pigs could be got to fly if bladders filled with hydrogen gas were attached to them. He launched pigs, thus lightened, from the roof of his house, only to perish. All these Dillons are eccentric, energetic, fond of out-of-the-way pursuits. The present peer has a taste for archaeology, and has just been made curator of the armoury at the Tower. He possesses a small estate and an enormous palace in Oxfordshire ; his other estates, in the worst part of Ireland, are a perfect “ pauper warren," yielding little rent. From this side the

Stanleys of Alderley get their “ difficult dispositions." When the deceased dowager’s ten children—the present Lord Stanley, Lyulph, Algernon, John, the girls, afterwards Mrs Fox-Pitt-Bivers, Countesses of Carlisle and Airlie, and Maud Stanley—lived together at 40 Dover street they disputed so logically and quarrelled so incessantly about questions and theories that each had to be provided with a separate sitting-room. Education was the darling crotchet or passion of the Dowager Lady Stanley. She was one of the founders of Girton, where her portrait hangs to-day; and of the Girls’ Public Day School Company, a great middle and upper class institution with schools all over London. In politics, her early radicalism did not survive the tests and trials which Mr Gladstone put his friends to in recent years. Up to 1888 or so she was a Home Buler, and, indeed, followed Mr Gladstone to the House of Commons in an open carriage, making a sort of demonstration of her own, the day he introduced the Home Buie Bill of 1886. She had been one of Freeman’s most fervid admirers and supporters in his “ perish India" and anti-Turkish crusades. But a few months ago I heard her rebuke Mr Leonard Courtney for suggesting a philosophic doubt about the wisdom of trying to retain our fortresses and hold in the Mediterranean. She was the last person Mr Gladstone called on before he left London.

The Government has given a grant of .iB3QQ to the Otago Training College.