Page:Wives of the prime ministers, 1844-1906.djvu/261

LADY SALISBURY younger mind, and, if power to enjoy is the attribute of youth, then she certainly had a younger temperament. They were married in 1857, and lived in a little house in Half Moon Street. They were not at all well off, and Lord Robert supplemented a small income with his pen, writing in the Quarterly and the Saturday Review. Lady Robert also wrote in the Saturday, a fact considered more unusual then than it would be now. Owing to their both writing anonymously, rumour of course embellished the fact, and Lady Robert was credited with some of the political articles (of the type known as "trenchant") which, as a matter of fact, were written by her husband, she having performed only the important rôle of critic. Lady Robert's own articles, unfortunately never collected, were chiefly on literary subjects.

Their eldest son was not born till 1861, to be followed by a long family of four more sons and two daughters. The relations of the mother with her children were thoroughly characteristic. To outsiders she seemed to exercise very little restraint on them, and to give them a degree of liberty of action that most children do not get. They were also treated by both parents far more as equals than is usual, 223