By the death of Lady Augusta Stanley, the wife of
the Dean of Westminster, which occurred, after a very long and most trying illness, on Wednesday last, London has lost one of the few connecting-links between the uppermost, the middle, and the lowest layers of English society. The daughter of a peer, and herself one of the most intimate of the Queen's personal friends, she had yet a very large circle of friends in the middle- classes, while the poorest inhabitants of the Westminster "slums" found in her sympathy and tenderness a frequent alleviation of their miseries. It is given to very few to be, as she was, a most effec- tive conducting medium of kind feeling between all the strangely motley elements of English society. Those who have the oppor- tunity for such a function rarely have adequate largeness of heart, and those who have the largeness of heart hardly ever have the adequate opportunity. Lady Augusta Stanley had both, and both in an unusual degree.
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