little of the Tories, -- except perhaps Mr. Gladstone, soon
to become a Liberal, and Sir Robert Peel. Disraeli was
of course, in those days, considered by the strict Whigs
as "impossible" -- a "charlatan," and "adventurer,"
almost "impostor."

In the world of letters she saw much of Sydney Smith,
who was early a friend of her father's. She actually had
the good fortune, while Miss Minnie Senior, to stop at the
Combe Florey Rectory, and to discover that the eminent
wit took as much trouble to amuse his own family when
alone as to set the tables of Mayfair upon a roar. He
liked to tease his girl guest by telling her that her father,
then a Master in Chancery, did not care a straw for his
daughter " Minnie." "De Minimis non curat Lex" -- "the
Master does not care for Minnie" -- was a favourite
travesty of the well-known maxim.

Rogers was also a friend, and as a girl she remembered
going to his "very small" breakfast-parties, in the cele-
brated dining-room in which hung his famous pictures.

They were hung high, so as to get the light which was at
the top of the room. It was this arrangement, by the
way, that made Sydney Smith say that Rogers' dining-
room was like Heaven and its opposite. There were
gods and angels in the upper part, but below was "gnash-
ing of teeth." While Rogers talked about his pictures,
he would have them taken down by his man-servant,
Edmond, and placed upon a chair at his side, or almost
upon the lap of his guest, so that he might lecture about
them at his ease. Mrs. Simpson often told me of the
horror she felt as a girl lest she should throw a spoonful
of soup over a Raphael or by an accident run a knife or a
fork into the immortal canvas! She had not learnt that
pictures are about the most indestructible things in the
world.

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