with which she adorned that high station and office, and the beautiful affection and quiet peace of the home-life she maintained, like a Roman matron, when her husband was called to serve the State.  And it so happened that I passed part of the last summer that she lived to see, here in Richmond, within a short walk of her house.  There I saw her constantly and held many conversations with her upon public affairs; and perhaps those were amongst the last occasions on which her powerful sense and heroic spirit had full play before the fatal illness which supervened in that very autumn.

I do not hesitate to speak of her powerful sense and her heroic spirit, for she united the statesman-like insight into political problems with the unflinching courage to stand by the cause of truth, humanity, and justice.  She was not impulsive at all, not hasty in forming her decisions, still less did she seek publicity or take pleasure in heading a movement.  But, with the great experience of politicians and of political things which in her long life and her rare opportunities she had acquired, she saw straight to the heart of so many vexed problems of our day; and when once convinced of the truth, she held fast to it with a noble intrepidity of soul.  In a life more or less conversant with public men now for forty years past, I have rarely known either man or woman who had a more sound judgment in great public questions.  And I have known none who surpassed her in courage, in directness, and in fixity of purpose.  No sense that she and her friends had to meet overwhelming odds would ever make her faint-hearted.  No desertion by friends and old comrades ever caused her to waver.  No despair ever touched that stalwart soul, however dark the outlook might appear; for it was her faith that no right or just cause was ever really lost, however for the time it were defeated and contemned.

Lady Frances Elliot, as she was before marriage, came of a race of soldiers, governors, and tried servants of the State, and she married into a race which has long stood in the front rank of the historic servants of the Crown and of the people.  But neither the house of Elliot nor that of Russell in so many generations ever bred man or woman with a keener sense of public duty, a more generous nature, and a more magnanimous soul.  In the annals of that famous house, whose traditions are part of the history of England, there has been no finer example of the old motto, noblesse oblige, if we understand it to mean—­those who have high place inherit with it heavy responsibilities.  That idea was the breath of her life to Countess Russell, as assuredly it was also to her husband, and she whose memory we keep sacred to-day is worthy to take her place beside that Rachel Lady Russell of old, who, more than two centuries ago, suffered so deeply in the cause of freedom and of conscience; she whose blood runs in the veins of the children who to-day revere the memory of their mother.