182 MEMORIES OF MY LIFE
too exclusively on the devotional side of her character, and fails sadly to bring out her originality, charm, and humour. Like many other persons who are profoundly religious, she too was perfectly tolerant of other beliefs than her own if they were genuine and decorously expressed.
Her endowment of a Chapel of Rest in the Bayswater Road has by no means fulfilled her wishes. Her object was to ' establish a quiet artistic shelter, where persons desiring a few minutes' withdrawal from the turmoil of life, might enter and commune in quiet with themselves. She obtained a disused chapel, and arranged for its maintenance. Then she took great pains over the designs that were to be painted on the walls in fresco. When these were sufficiently advanced, she, long since a widow and in rapidly declining health, invited many friends to its opening. My wife and I were rather late, and I can see now the, sweet welcoming gesture with which she beckoned us up to her on the platform. We never saw her again. She lingered on, unwilling, or unable, to see any even of her oldest friends, and at length died. The Chapel of Rest remained unfinished for some years. It is little used, and can, or could, be entered only at specified hours.
As to Mr. Russell Gurney, who served on many important commissions, he twice refused a judgeship, preferring to retain his post of " Recorder " of the City of London, which is of nearly equal dignity to a judgeship, and did not at that time preclude its holder from sitting in Parliament. He was member for Southampton. I have known no one who struck me as a more just, searching, and yet kindly judge, or
