recollection the impression of a strong character, with an intellect
with a coarse vein in it, verging sometimes on brutality, and of a
mind little exercised on subjects of thought beyond the immediate
interests of public and private life, little cultivated, and drawing
its stores, not from reading but from experience, and long and
varied intercourse with men and women."

Having come rather late in life to the chief place in politics,
Palmerston kept it to the end. He was an indomitable fighter, and
had extraordinary health. At the opening of the Session of 1865 he
gave the customary Full-Dress Dinner, and Mr. Speaker Denison,[*]
who sat beside him, made this curious memorandum of his performance
at table: "He ate two plates of turtle soup; he was then served very
amply to cod and oyster sauce; he then took a _pâté_; afterwards
he was helped to two very greasy-looking entrées; he then despatched
a plate of roast mutton; there then appeared before him the largest,
and to my mind the hardest, slice of ham that ever figured on the
table of a nobleman, yet it disappeared just in time to answer the
enquiry of the butler, 'Snipe or pheasant, my lord?' He instantly
replied, 'Pheasant,' thus completing his ninth dish of meat at
that meal." A few weeks later the Speaker, in conversation with
Palmerston, expressed a hope that he was taking care of his health,
to which the octogenarian Premier replied: "Oh yes--indeed I am. I
very often take a cab at night, and if you have both windows open
it is almost as good as walking home." "Almost as good!" exclaimed
the valetudinarian Speaker. "A through draught and a north-east
wind! And in a hack cab! What a combination for health!"

[Footnote *: Afterwards Lord Ossington.]