INTRODUCTION
of the House, was strong and intense. Disraeli's novels afford an admirable picture of the social side of the political life of his time.
As the memoir of Mrs. Gladstone in this volume amply proves, a wife's influence can keep her husband in power when he himself would be glad to relinquish it; and it has been said over and over again, by those in a position to judge, that had Lady Rosebery lived, Lord Rosebery's political career would have been very different. In every case in which we have the published letters of the husbands to the wives here commemorated, and wherever also we have been privileged to see unpublished letters of the kind, we realise how the wife was the confidante of all details concerning the high matters of State in which the husband was interested. The memoir of Lady Palmerston well brings out the important use a clever woman could make of such information, and it is quite certain that outside the Cabinet and the great Government Departments no one knew more about what was going on in the world than the wives of the Prime Ministers. A looker-on can see more of the game than one actively engaged in it, and
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