but feel that there was accident in its actual occurrence. Had we
been in London, or at Pembroke Lodge, and not at Woburn Abbey at
the time, they would have met and talked over the subjects of their
difference. Words spoken might have been equally strong, but would
have been less cutting than words written, and conciliatory
expressions on John's part would have led the way to promises on
Lord Palmerston's to avoid committing his colleagues in future, as
he had done in the case of the coup d'etat, and also to avoid any
needless risk of irritating the Queen by neglect in sending
dispatches to the Palace. It was characteristic of my husband to
bear patiently for a long while with difficulties, opposition,
perplexities, doubts raised by those with whom he acted, listening
to them with candour and good temper, and only meeting their
arguments with his own; but, at last, if he failed to convince
them, to take a sudden resolution--either yielding to them entirely
or breaking with them altogether--from which nothing could shake
him, but which, on looking back in after years, did not always seem
to him the best course. My father, who knew him well, once said to
me, half in joke and half in earnest: "Your husband is never so
determined as when he is in the wrong." It was a relief to him to
have done with hesitation and be resolved on any step which this
very anxiety to have done with hesitation led him to believe a
right one at the moment. This habit of mind showed itself in
private as in public matters, and his children and I were often
startled by abrupt decisions on home affairs announced very often
by letter.

In the case of the dismissal of Lord Palmerston, there was but Lord
Palmerston himself who found fault. The rest of the Cabinet were unanimous
in approbation. But there was not one of them whose opinions on foreign
policy were, in John's mind, worth weighing against those of Lord
Palmerston. He and John were always in cordial agreement on the great lines
of foreign policy, so far as I remember, except on Lord Palmerston's
unlucky and unworthy sanction of the _coup d'etat_.

They two kept up the character of England as the sturdy guardian of her own
rights against other nations and the champion of freedom and independence
abroad. They did so both before and after the breach of 1851, which was
happily closed in the follo