Page:Wives of the prime ministers, 1844-1906.djvu/257

LADY SALISBURY and the family were well known as advanced Tractarians.

Every year the Alderson family (which consisted of ten children besides Georgiana) used to spend their summer holidays at Lowestoft, where were other friends with young families, conspicuously the Palgraves. Of the Palgraves the best known was Francis, afterwards the editor of the Golden Treasury. There is in existence a little green-covered book called Lays of Lowestoft, which consists of parodies of mediæval ballads and heroic couplets something like the Ingoldsby Legends, though it is perhaps unfair to call into comparison these high-spirited, but naturally immature, productions with that brilliant collection of satirical verse. The jokes and allusions are rather obscure to the outsider, but the whole volume gives an impression of zest and great enjoyment. Georgiana opens the volume with a lively account of a cricket match, and there are descriptions of picnics and excursions of all sorts, to which the family drove in a donkey-cart, with tea, umbrellas, and "Tennyson's poems our hearts to affect." On another occasion they are all depicted as lying on the heather singing glees and part-songs (the 219