LADY JOCELYN 93

Fortescue. And then I felt as if it were a finer thing to be
a Lord-in-waiting.'

This romantic attachment lasted for many years,
and there was some gossip at court. It reached the
ears of the Queen who may well have remembered
her warning to Lord John Russell on the subject of
Lord Dufferin's seductive charm. She appears, none
the less, to have regarded this romance with sym-
pathetic eyes. There is a note in Lord Dufferin's
journal written in 1851 when he was on duty at
Windsor. * Visited Lady Jocelyn in her room. Sud-
denly the Queen came in, and made me a low curtsey
in fun/ It may have been his chivalrous devotion to
Lady Jocelyn which induced him to remain a bachelor
until his thirty-seventh year. As a young man, pro-
foundly influenced by the ethics of Walter Scott, he
regarded feminine purity as the most untouchable of
human virtues : we may be certain that his devotion
to Lady Jocelyn remained unavowed.

Forty-five years later he visited her grave at Cannes,
where she had died in 1880. He made the following
entry in his journal:

* I found the tombs of poor Lady Jocelyn, Lord Roden,
and my godson Eric Jocelyn, and left a wreath on Lady
Jocelyn's.

e She was the earliest and dearest friend I ever had; a
most beautiful, attractive and good woman. When I
knew her, she had everything that this world can give;
a happy home, a husband she loved, four beautiful child-
ren ; beauty, charm, popularity. She was the step-
daughter of the Prime Minister, one of the Queen's ladies
and one of her dearest friends. She lived in a charming
little cottage the Queen had given her at Kew, which