hed friends. In 1873 his
wife died. In the following year he married a daughter of Mr. James
Wilson, well known as the fellow-worker of Cobden and Bright in the
agitation against the Corn Laws, and as Finance Minister in India, where
he sank under the cares of his office in 1860. Mr. Wilson had been
Greg's intimate friend from the days of the League down to the time of
his death. When by and by Mr. Greg retired from his post as Controller
(1877), he wrote:--

For myself, since I gave up office, I feel comparatively
and indeed positively in haven and peace, and with
much and rather unusual brightness and sunshine round
me, and with my interest in the world, both speculative
and practical, quite undiminished, and finding old age on
the whole cheerful and quiet, and the position of a _spectator_
by no means an unenviable one.

This was his attitude to the end. A heavy shock fell upon him in the
death of his brother-in-law, Walter Bagehot (1877), that brilliant
original, well known to so many of us, who saw events and books and men
with so curious an eye.

He was quite a unique man [Mr. Greg wrote to Lady
Derby], as irreplaceable in private life as he is universally
felt to be in public. He had the soundest head I ever
knew since Cornewall Lewis left us, curiously original,
yet without the faintest taint of crotchetiness, or prejudice,
or passion, which so generally mars originality. Then
he was high-minded, and a gentleman to the backbone; the
man of all I knew, both mentally and morally, best _worth
talking things over with_; and I was besides deeply attached
to him personally. We had been intimates and _collaborateurs_
in many lines for twenty-five years; so that altogether
there is a great piece gone out of my daily life, and
a great stay also--the greatest, in fact. There is no man
living who was, taken all in all, so much of me.

There is a pensive grace about one of his last letters to the widow of
the favourite brother of earlier days:--

I cannot let Christmas pass, dear Mary, without sending
you a word of love and greeting from us both, to all
of you of both generations. It cannot be a "merry"
Christmas for any of us exactly; there is so much around
that is anxious and sad, and indeed almost gloomy, and
life is passing away to our juniors. But we have still
much to make us thankful and even happy; and, as a
whole, life to those whom it concerns, m