worthily closing his great political career. In November of this year he was seized by another paralytic stroke. As it was seen that his end was near, his brother who afterwards succeeded him, his only surviving sister Lady Palmerston, together with her husband and sons, were summoned to his bedside at Brocket Hall. Conscious of their presence he greeted them with the old friendly smile which lost nothing of its usual cheeriness because he was about to quit a world which philosophically he had at once enjoyed and despised. He died on the evening of November 24, 1848, quite tranquilly and without pain. Next morning the biography of him which had lain in its pigeon-hole in The Times office was published in that paper much to the mortification and indignation of his relatives and friends. "It certainly was coarse, vulgar, and to a great degree unjust "; says Greville who adds, "It was a mere daub and caricature, and very discreditable to the paper.'

In a letter he left, he made a solemn declaration confirming a statement he had given to Sir John Campbell, his counsel in the divorce suit brought against him by Norton (June 1836). In this he stated that he had never misconducted himself with Mrs. Norton, that he had never held any furtive or clandestine correspondence with her whatsoever, and that both in visiting and in writing to her he had always considered himself to be acting with the full

knowledge and approbation of her husband. As indiscretion had exposed Mrs. Norton to obloquy and suspicion, Melbourne said, he was bound to renew this declaration. The Queen, as she wrote in her Journal, deeply deplored the loss of "one who was a most kind and interested friend of mine, and most sincerely attached to me. He was indeed for the first two years and a half of my reign, almost the only friend I had except Stockmar and Lehzen." Later she learned from Lady Palmerston, that her last letter to Lord Melbourne had been a great comfort and relief to him; and that during the last melancholy years of his life she had often been the chief means of cheering him. Lord Melbourne was succeeded by his only brother Frederick James Lamb who died without issue, when the title became extinct. His estates were inherited by his sister Lady Palmerston, who at her death bequeathed them to her eldest son by her first husband, Lord Cowper.

CHAPTER X

Poets living at Her Majesty's accession-Robert Southey William Wordsworth and public neglect A Civil List pension granted him by Sir Robert Peel-Made Poet Laureate-Samuel Rogers-His beautiful house and its distinguished company-Thomas Campbell-Takes Lord Abercorn by the buttonhole-Thomas Moore in his latter days-His memory fails-Forgotten by the world he adoredRichard Monckton Milnes-His volumes of poems and his breakfasts-Sir Robert Peel advisesAlfred Tennyson's early poems-Placed on the Civil List Pension—" He can never become popular "Carlyle's description of him-Becomes LaureateGoes to Court-Edward Fitzgerald and Alfred Tennyson-The latter reads his poems-Their varying fortunes-The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám First noticed by Dante Gabriel Rossetti-Robert Browning a dandy-His attempt at dramatic authorship-Introduced by John Kenyon to Elizabeth Barrett-Her early life of loneliness-Her correspondence with Browning-"A small person scarcely embodied at all "—Her private marriage— Goes to Italy-Sonnets from the Portuguese-God takes her.

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