His portrait by Raeburn is the property of Glasgow University, and in the National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, there is a good medallion by Tassie, taken in his eighty-first year.
When the weakness of his eyes made it necessary for him to depend almost entirely on the service of readers and secretaries, in his eighty-first year he began to write the Weltgeschichte (9 vols., Leipzig, 1883-88).
He died of the plague in the eighty-first year of his age (365).
The mathematical tribunal has, however, from time immemorial counted the first year of the first cycle from the eighty-first of Yao, that is to say, from the year 2277 B.C.
But Lord Selborne did not carry on his opposition to Gladstone's proposals only in his library or by his pen; in the year1886-1887he travelled to many parts of the country, and addressed meetings in defence of the union between the Church and state and against Home Rule; and in September 1893, in his eighty-first year, he addressed a powerful speech to the House of Lords in opposition to the Home Rule Bill.
