days. We look at the well-known faces, and think of the famous names among
the crowd of mature men, each of whom was hanging on the words and looks of
his mistress. There is Copley the painter's son, sagacious Lyndhurst, who
lived to be the Nestor of the bench and the peerage; there is his great
opponent, Robertson the historian's grand-nephew, Brougham, a tyrant of
freedom, an illustrious Jack-of-all-trades, the most impassioned, most
public-spirited, most egotistical of men. He was a contradiction to himself
as well as to his neighbours. His strongly-marked face, with its shaggy
brows, high cheek-bones, aggressive nose, mouth drooping at the corners,
had not lost its mobility. He was restless and fault-finding in this
presence as in any other. The Duke of Wellington's Roman nose lent
something of the eagle to his aspect. It was a more patrician attribute
than Sir Robert Peel's long upper lip, with its shy, nervous compression,
which men mistook for impassive coldness, just as the wits blundered in
calling his strong, serviceable capacity, noble uprightness, and patient
labour "sublime mediocrity." William Lamb, Viscount Melbourne, was the type
of an aristocrat, with brains and heart. He was still a very handsome man
at fifty-eight, as he was also "perhaps the most graceful and agreeable
gentleman of the generation." His colleague--destined to marry Lord
Melbourne's sister, the most charming woman who ever presided in turn over
two Ministerial _salons_, Lord Palmerston, in spite of his early
achievements in waltzing at Almack's, was less personally and mentally
gifted. He had rather an indiarubber-like elasticity and jauntiness than
stateliness, or dignity, or grace. His irregular-featured face was comical,
but he bore the bell in exhaustless spirits, which won him, late in life,
the reputation of perennial juvenility, and the enviable if not altogether
respectful sobriquet of "the evergreen Palm." Lord John Russell, with his
large head and little body, of which _Punch_ made stock, with his
friendship for Moore and his literary turn, as well as his ambition to
serve his country like a true Russell, was at this date wooing and wedding