" The money she would have spent there,--the very crumbs
that would have fallen from her table, would have been a benefaction to
that poor people.
The Fenian drama had its ghastly closing _tableau_ in the hanging of
the ringleaders, and the explosion at Clerkenwell. The hanging of those
Fenians must have been about the last of that sort of a public
entertainment, as a law was soon passed making all future executions
strictly private. Among a certain class of Her Majesty's subjects this
was a most unpopular measure. Pot-house politicians and gin-palace
courtiers, both ladies and gentlemen, discussed it hotly and denounced it
sternly, as an infringement on the sacred immemorial rights of British
freemen and a blow to the British Constitution.
In 1874 Mr. Disraeli had become Prime Minister. He died in 1880--Lord
Beaconsfield, sincerely lamented by the Queen, who was much attached to
him as a friend, and greatly admired him as a man of genius. He was a
brilliant novelist and a famous statesman; but the best things I know of
him are the tender love and manly gratitude he always testified towards
his devoted wife, and his pathetic mourning for her loss. He might have
adopted for her tombstone the quaint, terse epitaph of an American
husband--"Think what a wife should be, and she was that.
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