-love to God and man--is the heart of
religion. Her religion was contemplative as well as practical; but it was a
religion of the conscience rather than one of mystical emotions.

Of personal influences, her mother's, until marriage, was the strongest.
There are only two long breaks in the diary she kept, when she had no heart
to write down her thoughts; one occurs during the year of Lady Minto's long
and serious illness at Berlin, which began in 1832, and the other after
Lord John Russell's death in 1878.

Lady Minto was not strong; bringing many sons and daughters into the world
had tried her; and her delicacy seems to have drawn her children closer
round her. Lady Fanny's references to her mother are full of an anxious,
protective devotion, as though she were always watching to see if any
shadow of physical or mental trouble were threatening her. So in imagining
the merry, active life of this large family, the presence of a mother most
tenderly loved, from whom praise seemed something almost too good to be
true, must not be forgotten.

In November, 1830 (the year Lady Fanny's diaries begin), the Duke of
Wellington resigned, having emphatically declared that the system of
representation ought to possess, and _did_ possess, the entire
confidence of the country. He had gone so far as to say that the wit of man
could not have devised a better representative system than that which Lord
John Russell, in the previous session, had attempted to alter by proposing
to enfranchise Manchester, Leeds, and Birmingham. But the election which
followed the death of George IV on June 26th had not borne out the Duke's
assertion; it had gone heavily against him. Lord Grey, forming his Ministry
out of the old Whigs and the followers of Canning and Grenville, at once
made Reform a Cabinet measure. During the stormy elections of July the news
came from Paris that Charles X had been deposed, and unlike the news of the
French Revolution, it acted as a stimulus, not as a check, to the reforming
party in England.

The next entry quoted from Lady Fanny's diary, begun at the age of
fourteen, is dated November 22, 1830; the family were travelling towards
Paris, matters having almost quieted down there. Louis Philippe had been
recognized by England as King of the French the month before, and the only
side of the revolution which came under her young eyes was the somewhat
vamped up enthusiasm for the Citizen King which followed his acceptance of