REFORM BILL.

Otago Witness, Issue 2104, 21 June 1894, Page 42

REFORM BILL.

■ Lord. Russell had a considerable time of retirement, which he passed in a dignified and intellectual repose. He had a mental furniture fit for repose, if such an expression may be need, which was not the possession et Palmerston. He had broad literary tastss ; he had even something of a literary instinct ; he loved books, and loved the society of men and women who wrote books — at one time he bai even thought of giving up politics and becoming a writer of books himself. He had seen under his own roof in familiar and friendly intercourse every literary man ■of his time who was worth knowing. A portrait of Tbomaß Moore still hangs in the house that, was once Lord Russell's home. Dickens, Tennyson, Thackeray, Brownlug, and Matthew Arnold were among his frequent guests. He had known Byron and Mefcternich and Taileyrand.

He had accompanied Wellington in some of his Peninsular campaigns, and had talked with Napoleon at Elba. •

I shall nevir forget the strange sensation it gave me when one day I heard him tell that in his youth he had met at Florence the widow of Charles Stuart — the widow of Bonnie Prince Charlie 1 All the literary and artistic tastes of a highly-cultured mind, all the vaiious memories of a career so happy in its friendships and acquaintanceships, accompanied him into his retirement and peopled it with bright thoughts. He never relaxed in his interest in political questions, and he listened up to the very last to the murmurs of the outer world as a dying chief might strain his fading sense for the sounds of the battlefield. I listened to the last speech made by LOBD BEACONFIELD

in the House of Lords. I noted, as everybody else did, the trouble he had in trying to remember the name of Herat — it was Herat, surely I—and1 — and the frank admission at last that he could not recollect it. Lord Beaconsfield did not live long to enjoy his he have really enjoyed it. He had, of course, a great feeling of pride and satisfaction in his own political career. " Let people say what they will of me," Lord Beaconsfield once observed to John Bright, " they cannot deny that I was twice Prime Minister of England."

But a man of Mr Disraeli's mental activity and strong personal ambition cannot live on proud memories alone.

In his later days, Mr Disraeli was somewhat inclined, I have been assured, to "mope," as women would say. He had always been a man of an uncertain temperament—given now and then to brooding and silent moods.

Many a close friend of his, men and women, has told me that he was not a guest to rely upon always for bright conversation at a dinner party. Sometimes he wonld talk with vivacity and humour ; at other times, and for no apparent reason, he would sit moodily and obstinately silent, with his head bent forward and bis eyes fixed on his plate. No one ever said that Lord Beaconsfield's personal and political friends deserted him in his later time and left him to a lonely old age.

Up to the last he took a quick and lively interest in the account given to him of all the people who daily called at his hou3e in Ourzon street, and not seldom made comments that were characteristic of the author of " Vivian Grey." — Daily News.