[Anon.], ‘Lord Palmerston’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 98 (1865), pp. 622–35; John Bowring, ‘Recollections of Lord Palmerston’, Fortnightly Review, 3 (1865–6), pp. 1–11; [Anon.], ‘Lord Palmerston’, British Quarterly Review, 43 (1866), pp. 125–42

Palmerston’s death, at Brocket on 18 October 1865, took the nation largely by surprise. He had been taken ill just six days earlier, and it was only some four months before that he had won his last General Election. His death naturally occasioned obituaries in all of the daily papers, and in addition, in eight different periodicals of a variety of political persuasions. Not that the event, painful as people felt it to be, could have taken anybody much by surprise. The mind, though clear enough, when directed to any particular subject, had lost its habitual acuteness; and the elasticity and vigour of the once vigorous frame were entirely gone. Experience proves that when men who have been long content to play a secondary part in their profession, whatever it may be, find themselves by the force of circumstances thrust into the foremost rank.