vilege. At six years
of age I was promoted to lunch in the dining-room with my parents, and
I always kept my ears open. I had then one brother in the House of
Commons, and we being a politically inclined family, most of the
notabilities of the Tory party put in occasional appearances at
Chesterfield House at luncheon-time. There was Mr. Disraeli, for whom
my father had an immense admiration, although he had not yet occupied
the post of Prime Minister. Mr. Disraeli's curiously impassive face,
with its entire absence of colouring, rather frightened me. It looked
like a mask. He had, too, a most singular voice, with a very impressive
style of utterance. After 1868, by which time my three elder brothers
were all in the House of Commons, and Disraeli himself was Prime
Minister, he was a more frequent visitor at our house.

In 1865 my uncle, Lord John Russell, my mother's brother, was Prime
Minister. My uncle, who had been born as far back as 1792, was a very
tiny man, who always wore one of the old-fashioned, high black-satin
stocks right up to his chin. I liked him, for he was always full of fun
and small jokes, but in that rigorously Tory household he was looked on
with scant favour. It was his second term of office as Prime Minister,
for he had been First Lord of the Treasury from 1846 to 1852; he had
also sat in the House of Commons for forty-seven years. My father was
rather inclined to ridicule his brother-in-law's small stature, and
absolutely detested his political opinions, declaring that he united
all the ineradicable faults of the Whigs in his diminutive person.
Listening, as a child will do, to the conversation of his elders, I
derived the most grotesquely false ideas as to the Whigs and their
traditional policy. I gathered that, with their tongues in their
cheeks, they advocated measures in which they did not themselves
believe, should they think that by so doing they would be able to
enhance their popularity and maintain themselves in office: that, in
order to extricate themselves from some present difficulty, they were
always prepared to mortgage the future recklessly, quite regardless of
the ultimate consequences: that whilst professing the most liberal
principles, they were absurdly exclusive in their private lives, not
consorting with all and sundry as we poor Tories did: that convictions
mattered less than office: that in fact nothing much mattered, provided
that the government of the country remained perm