Chapter IV: Part 4

My village gossips tell me that fermentation will stop of itself when I draw the wine off the lye; but the French practice certainly seems to be to burn sulphur matches in the vat and so kill the vinegar germs there latent. And then _platrage_? You sprinkle the must with plaster of Paris before fermentation begins. Is that done in England? It is not done in this part of England at least. Nor do I know why it is done in France. Probably before I have solved my problems by stomach-ache and other experiences of a biliary kind, prohibition will be in the air over here, wafted upon some newspaper breeze from America. There will be no difficulty in starting a fermentation out of that sweeping doctrine, that's for certain. I don't say that we need take prohibition seriously; but we think about it, naturally, and talk about it out here.

If it were put to the local vote in this village, it would be lost. We have many total abstainers, yet one of them, I know, and several of them, I believe, would vote against it. Says the one I am sure of: "If I abstain from strong drink, as I do, it is my own doing; and if I were tempted to a fall and withstood it, that is to my credit. But if the law cuts me off it, and I am a criminal if I drink, it cuts me off a good part of my credit too--and I am against that." My friend has there put his finger upon a sharp little dilemma. If alcohol is a bad thing, then prohibition is a good thing. But if temperance is a good thing, then prohibition is a bad thing. You cannot be temperate in the use of alcohol if you have none. Nor is sobriety a virtue in you if you lock up the wine-cellar and throw the keys down the well. Very well; then will you do without alcohol or without temperance? There is the choice; and I have made mine.

Besides, we are all for liberty down here, individualists to a man. Give us a loophole to avoid compulsion and we use it. One of the most frequently exercised of my magisterial functions is to certify conscientious objections to the Vaccination Act. I do it against the grain. A doctor told me the other day that he believed smallpox had reached the end of its tether, and was on the ebb. I am sure I hope so, lest there should be one day a bad outbreak among these liberty men. I must have signed away the chances of hundreds of children, who, by the way, are not of an age to consent. I never fail to point out the risk; but the Court awards it and the law allows it; so I sign.

There is much to be said for Anarchy in the abstract, nothing at all in the concrete. Mr. Smillie, however, appears to favour it, raw, rough and ready. In that he is precocious, and, like the rathe primrose, will "forsaken die." He will rend the Labour party in twain from the top to the bottom, and will see the agricultural vote drop off his industrials just as it had begun to adhere to them. I know the peasantry. They will never strike for political ends, for though they are not quick to see the consequences of hypothetical actions, they do see that if you make Parliamentary government impossible you make a Labour majority not worth having.

And another thing: Mr. Smillie and his friends may want a revolution, but Hodge and his most certainly do not. They want to earn their livelihood, pay their way, and dig their plots of ground. No more warfare for them. I dare say I shall be sorry for Mr. Smillie when the time comes; but I may have to be still more sorry for my country first. I can't help hoping, however, when it comes to the point that his feet will be a little colder than his head seems to be just now.

_LA PETITE PERSONNE_

No letter-writer's stage can at any time be called empty, because upon it you necessarily have at all times two persons at least: the mover of the figures and the audience, the puppeteer and the puppetee, the letter-writer and the letter-reader. The play presented is, therefore, a play within a play: like the _Mousetrap_ in _Hamlet_, like _Pyramus and Thisbe_ in _A Midsummer Night's Dream_, like the romantic drama of _Gayferos and Melisandra_ which Don Quixote witnessed with a select company of acquaintance at an inn. The temperament of this presented spectator, himself or herself a person of the scene, is always reflected in the entertainment when the letter-writer is a sensitive artist. So Horace Walpole's comedy varies according as it goes before Sir Horace Mann in Florence or Lady Upper-Ossory at Ampthill; so, more delicately, does Madame de Sevigne's. There are blacker strokes in the dialogue when Bussy is to see the play; there is always idolatry implied, and sometimes anxiety, if the spoilt child of Provence is the audience. It is this _chere bonne_, this Madame de Grignan, nine times out of ten, who is queen of the entertainment. You have to reckon with her upon her throne of degrees, set up there like Hippolita, Duchess of Athens, to be propitiated and, if possible, diverted. For her sake, not for ours, her incomparable mother beckons from the wings character after character, and gives each his cue, having set the scene with her exquisite art. In a few cases her anxiety to please spoils the effects. As we should say, she "laboured" the Cardinal de Retz. The sour-faced beauty would have none of him. But that is a rare case, one in which predilection betrayed her. Madame de Sevigne had a weakness for the Cardinal. It is very seldom that the lightest hand in the world fails her at a portrait. Her great successes are her thumb-nail sketches: she will be remembered by Picard in the hayfield so long as the world knows how to laugh. One of her best, because one of her tenderest, is the _petite personne_.

The name is Charles de Sevigne's, but his mother takes it up after him, and makes better play with it. Charles writes from Les Rochers in December, 1675--Madame being really ill for once in her life with "a nice little rheumatism," and Charles her amanuensis--"in the room of la Plessis," that striving lady, too, was ill, or thought she was--"we have had lately a very pretty young party (_une petite personne fort jolie_) whose good looks don't at all remind us of that divinity. At her instigation we have started _Reversis_: now, instead of knaves, we talk about jacks." He adds a stroke too good to be lost, though his mother might have left it out. "To give you a notion of her age and quality, she has just confided to us that the day after Easter Eve was a Tuesday. She thought that over, then said, 'No--it was a Monday!' Then, judging by the look of us that that wouldn't do either, 'Heavens, how stupid! Of course--it was a Friday!' That is the kind of party we are. If you wouldn't mind sending us word what day of the week you believe it to have been, you will save us a great deal of discomfort." The stage is the brisker for the coming in of this pretty _soubrette_.

Madame de Sevigne, meantime, is in a discomfort of her own. It takes her some ten days to absorb the _petite personne_, but then she fixes her for ever. Nobody can wish to know more about a young party than this:

"_Christmas Day_ (1675).... I still have that nice child here.
She lives on the other side of the park; her mother is the
good-wife Marcile's daughter--but you won't remember her. The
mother lives at Rennes, but I shall keep her here. She plays
_trictrac, reversis;_ she is quite pretty, quite innocent, and
called Jeannette. She is no more trouble than Fidele."

Quite pretty, quite innocent and called Jeannette! _Quid Plura?_ Need I say who Fidele was? Fidele is a shrewd touch of Madame's, put in, as I guess, to placate the hungry-eyed Goddess of Grignan; but it does clinch the portrait. All that one needs to know of the nature, parentage, and upbringing of a _petite personne_ is in these two letters.

Immediately upon her entry the comedy begins, with Mademoiselle du Plessis in a leading part. "... La Plessis has a quartan fever. It is pretty to see her jealous fury when she comes here and finds the child with me. The fuss there is to have my stick or muff to hold! But enough of these nothings...."

It was of nothings that the vexed days of Mlle. du Plessis must exist. An elderly virgin, evidently; stiff, gauche, full of _guinderie_, says Madame, "_et de l'esprit fichu_." Everybody made game of her at Les Rochers. As we shall see, the servants knew that very well. Charles is always witty at her expense. Madame de Grignan once slapped her.

Meanwhile, here's another vignette, a Chardin picture--you will find nothing by Greuze of this _petite personne_. "... What do you think of the handy little lady we were telling you of, who couldn't make out what the day after Easter Eve was? She is a dear little rosebud of a thing who delights us."

"'In six years to come she'll be twenty years old!' I wish you could see her in the mornings, eating a hunk of bread-and-butter as long as from here to Easter, or, after dinner, crunching up two green apples with brown bread...."

But now the clowns come tumbling in, to turn over the poor du Plessis. "... Mlle. du Plessis will die of the _petite personne_. Being more than half dead of jealousy already, she is always at my people to find out how I treat her. Not one of them but has a pin ready. One says that I love her as much as I do you; another that I have her to sleep with me--which would assuredly be a notable sign of affection! They swear that I am taking her to Paris, that I kiss her, am mad about her; that the Abbe is giving her 10,000 _livres_; that if she had but 20,000 _ecus_ I should marry her to my son. That is the sort of thing; and they carry it so far that we can't help laughing at it. The poor lady is ill with it all."

To the same letter Charles adds his scene in the farce: "La Plessis said to Rahuel (he was the concierge) yesterday that she had been gratified at dinner to find that Madame had turned the child out of her seat and put herself in the place of honour. And Rahuel, in his Breton way: 'Nay, Miss, there's no wonder. 'Tis an honour to your years, naturally. Besides, the little girl is one of the house, as you might say. Madame looks on her almost as she might be Madame de Grignan's little sister.'"

La Plessis, in fact, agonised, and the way was made for the great scene--so good a scene that I think it must have been bagged for the theatre. Labiche must surely have lifted it. It is Charles de Sevigne's masterpiece.

"The young party here, when she saw how my mother's pains
increased towards night, thought that the best thing she could
do for her was to cry--which she did. She is that sort, and
always the focus of jealousy for la Plessis, who tries to
recommend herself to my mother by hating her like the devil.
This is what happened yesterday. My mother was dozing quietly
in bed; the child, the Abbe and I were by the fire. In came La
Plessis. We warned her to come quietly, and she did, and was
half across the room when my mother coughed, and then asked
for her handkerchief to get rid of some phlegm. The child and
I jumped up to get it, but La Plessis was too quick for us,
rushed to the bed, and instead of putting the thing to my
mother's lips, caught hold of her nose with it, and pinched
it so hard that the poor dear cried out with the pain. She
couldn't help being sniffy with the old fuss who had hurt
her so--nor laughing at her afterwards. If you had seen this
little comedy you would have laughed too."

I should like to know who wouldn't have laughed to tears, after it was over. The scene is priceless.

But all the same, it is not Madame de Sevigne's _genre_. She is mistress of the chuckle, not of the _fou rire_; and La Plessis is not one of her best characters. The _petite personne_, however, is; and I must give a very pretty scene, quite in her own manner, where she is half laughing at the child and half in love with her too.

"The _petite personne_ is still here, and always delightful.
She has a sharp little wit of her own, too, as new as a young
chick's. We enjoy telling her things, for she knows nothing
at all, and it makes a kind of game to enlighten her on
all sides--with a word or two about the Universe, or about
Empires, or countries, or kings, or religions, or wars, or
Fate, or the map. There's a pretty jumble of facts to put
tidily away in a little head which has never seen a town, nor
even a river, and has never really supposed that the world
went any farther than the end of the park! But she is
delicious. I was telling her to-day about the taking of
Wismar; and she understands quite well that we are sorry about
it because the King of Sweden is our ally. See how wildly we
amuse ourselves."

The last sentence is for the _chere bonne's_ benefit, who was very capable herself of being jealous of the _petite personne_. I fancy the touch about Fidele was put in with the same object. She had to be infinitely careful with the _chere bonne's_ black dogs.

In another month the _petite personne_ is so far advanced that she can be secretary to her patroness, whose poor hand is too swollen to write. Elaborate perambulations introduce her to the _chere bonne_. "My son has gone to Vitre on some business or other. That is why I give his functions of secretary over to the little lady of whom I have often told you, and who begs you to be pleased to allow her, with great respect, to kiss your hands." That, I should think, was courtesy enough even for the pouting great lady of Provence. In a later letter she kisses Madame de Grignan's _left_ hand; so it is written--by herself, but to dictation. Thus the proper distances were kept by one as humane as Madame de Sevigne when she was dealing with her daughter on the other side of idolatry.

But she herself and the child are on better terms than such discipline would imply. In February: "... My letters are so full of myself that it bores me to have them read over. You have too much taste not to be bored too. So I shall stop: even the child is laughing at me now." And then in March: "... My son has left us--we are quite alone, the child and I--reading, writing, and saying our prayers." A jolly little picture of still and gentle life. No Greuze there.

The idyll ends in tears, but not just yet. Two days before she leaves Brittany, having "neither rhyme nor reason in my hands," she makes use of the _petite personne_ for the last time: "the most obliging child in the world. I don't know what I should have done without her. She reads me what I like--quite well; she writes as you see; she is fond of me; she is willing; she can talk about Madame de Grignan. In fact, you may love her on my assurance." And then the poor little dear puts in her little word for herself to propitiate this formidable Countess in Provence:

"That would make me very happy, Madame, and I am sure that you must envy my joy to be with your mother. She has been pleased to make me write all that praise of myself, though I was rather ashamed to do it. But I am very unhappy that she is going away."

Madame resumes the pen: "... The child, desired to converse with you ..."--which one may or may not believe. If, as I feel sure, she was bidden to the task, I don't see how she could possibly have brought it off better than in those demure phrases. But is she not a dear little creature?

Then came the dreadful day, the 24th of March, and Madame's coach and six horses carry her to Laval on her way to Paris. She stays there for the night and writes, of course, to her _chere bonne_: "... They carried off the _petite personne_ early this morning to save me the outcries of her grief. They were the sobs of a child, so natural that they moved me. I dare say she is dancing about now, but for two days she has been in floods, not having been able to learn restraint from me!" Madame, as we know, had abundantly the gift of tears, and was assuredly none the worse for it.

In Paris, Corbinelli was secretary for a time; but she regretted the _petite personne_. "... I don't like a secretary who is cleverer than I am.... The child suited me much better."

And there the happy little figurine, having danced her hour at Les Rochers, leaves the stage. Other _petites personnes_ there are--one the sister of _La Murinette Beaute_, who got on so well with M. de Rohan, and was a lady of Madame de Chaulnes', and presently married a respectable gentleman, a M. de le Bedoyere of Rennes. But these are too high levels for the granddaughter of the good-wife Marcile. That _petite personne_, moreover, was a rather sophisticated young lady. One would never have seen her, in the mornings, munching a hunk of bread-and-butter "as long as from here to Easter." No; Jeannette has fulfilled her part, providing a whiff of marjoram and cottage flowers for the castle chambers. She has read, written and said her prayers. She has the firm outline, the rosy cheeks, the simplicity of a Watteau peasant-girl--nothing of the Greuze languish, with its hint of a _cruche cassee_. She is as fresh as a March wind. Let us believe that she found a true man to relish her prettiness and sharp little wits.

A FOOL OF QUALITY

Tom Coryat, the "single-soled, single-souled and single-shirted observer of Odcombe," having finally bored his neighbours in the country past bearing, was volleyed off upon a tempest of their yawns to London. Exactly when that was I can't find out, but I suppose it to have been in the region of 1605.

In London he set up for a wit, was enrolled in "The Right Worshipful Fraternity of Sireniacal Gentlemen," who met at "The Sign of the Mere-maide in Bread Streete"; had John Donne and Ben Jonson among his convives, and may well have seen Shakespeare and heard him talk, if he did talk. How he appeared himself we can only guess, but I conceive his position in the society to have been that of Polonius in the convocation of politic worms, as one, namely, where he was eaten rather than eating. That, if it was so, may have determined him to make a name for himself by what was his strongest part, namely, his feet.

In 1608 he, the "Odcombian leg-stretcher," did indeed travel "for five months, mostly on foot, from his native place of Odcombe in Somerset, through France, Savoy, Italy, Rhetia, Helvetia, some parts of High Germany, and the Netherlands, making in the whole 1975 miles." He started on the 14th May and was in London again on the 3rd October, and if indeed he did travel mostly on foot, I call it a very creditable performance. The result was a book more talked of than read. "Coryat's Crudities, hastily gobbled up in five months' travels ... newly digested in the hungry aire of Odcombe in his county of Somerset, and now dispersed to the nourishment of the travelling members of this Kingdom." So runs the text of a Palladian title-page, surrounded by emblems of adventure which support a _vera effigies_ of Tom himself. He shows there as a beady-eyed bonhomme of thirty-five or so, with a Jacobean beard, and his hair brushed back and worn long, like that of our present-day young men.

The book published, the Sireniacal Gentlemen took off their coats and took up their battledores. Their gibes and quirks are all printed in my edition, and are better reading than the book itself. Coryat was a cockscomb and scorned a straight sentence. A rule of his was: "Never use one adjective if three will do." So far as I know he was the first Englishman who travelled for the fun or the glory of the thing, unless Fynes Moryson anticipated him in those also, as he certainly did in travelling and writing about it. But I think it more probable that Moryson went abroad to improve his mind. I don't think Coryat had any notion of that. Foppery may have moved him, vanity perhaps; in any case there can be no comparison between them. Moryson is thorough, Coryat is not. Moryson is often dull, Coryat seldom. Moryson was a student, Coryat a cockscomb. Moryson was a plain man, Coryat a euphuist of the first water. I haven't the least doubt but that Shakespeare met him at the Mermaid--he called himself a friend of Ben Jonson's--and took the best of him. You will find him in _Love's Labour's Lost_ as well as in _All's Well_. For a foretaste of his quality take a small portion of his first sentence, the whole of which fills a page: "I was imbarked at Dover, about tenne of the clocke in the morning, the fourteenth of May 1608, and arrived at Calais ... about five of the clocke in the afternoone, after I had varnished the exterior parts of the ship with the excrementall ebullitions of my tumultuous stomach...." There is more about it, but that will do. Shakespeare can never have missed such a man as that.

Coryat's abiding sensation throughout his travels was astonishment, not at the things which he saw, but rather that he from Odcombe in Somerset should be seeing them. He can never get over it. Here am I, Odcombian Tom, face to face with Amiens Cathedral, with the tombs of the kings at Saint Denis, at Fountaine Beleau cheek by jowl with Henri IV., crossing in a litter the "stupendious" Mont Cenis, pacing the Duomo of Milan, disputing with a Turk in Lyons, with a Jew in Padua, to the detriment of their religions, "swimming" in a gondola on the Grand Canal: here I am, and now what about it? There is always an imported flavour of Odcombe about it. He brings it with him and sprinkles it like scent. He is careful at every stage of his journey to give you the mileage from his own door; his measure of a city's quality is its worth to him as a gift were Odcombe the alternative. Few cities indeed survive the test. Mantua stood a fair chance. "That most sweet Paradise, that _domicilium Venerum et Charitum_," did so ravish his senses and tickle his spirits, he says, that he would desire to live there and spend the remainder of his days "in some divine meditations among the sacred Muses," but for two things, "their grosse idolatry and superstitious ceremonies, which I detest, and the love of Odcombe in Somersetshire, which is so deare unto me that I preferre the very smoak thereof before the fire of all other places under the sunne." So much for Mantua; but Venice, before whose "incomparable and most decantated majestie" his pen faints--Venice beats Odcombe, or something very much like it. He decides that should "foure of the richest mannors of Somersetshire" have been offered him if he would have undertaken not to see Venice, he would have gone without the manors. Odcombe, you see, is not put in question here. He was afraid to risk it.

When he came home he hung up his pair of shoes in the chancel of Odcombe Church, and they may be there to this day for all I know.

The Sireniacal Gentlemen made great sport of him.

If any aske in verse what soar I at?
My Muse replies The praise of Coryat----

so John Gyfford begins,

A work that will eternise thee till God come
And for thy sake the famous parish Odcombe----

so George Sydenham ends. Ben Jonson is not represented at the revels, and Inigo Jones lets his high spirits run away with him beyond the bounds of modern printing. Donne is not at his best:

Lo, here's a man worthy indeed to travell
Fat Libian plaines, strangest China's gravell;
For Europe well hath seen him stirre his stumpes,
Turning his double shoes to simple pumpes.

--the wit of which escapes me. Better is the conceit of

What had he done, had he e'er hugged th' ocean
With swimming Drake or famous Magelan,
And kiss'd that unturn'd cheeke of our old mother,
Since so our Europe's world he can discover?

The "unturn'd cheeke of our old mother!" The New World should be pleased with that.

In 1615 he made a much further flight, and was to be heard of at "the Court of the most Mighty Monarch, the Great Mogul," whence he wrote to, among other people, the High Seneschal of the "Right Worshipful Fraternity of Sireniacal Gentlemen that meet the first Friday of every month at the Signe of the Mere-maide in Bread-Streete." In this particular letter he greets by name Mr. John Donne, "the author of two most elegant Latine Bookes," Master Benjamin Jonson, the poet, at his chamber in the Blacke Friars, Mr. Samuel Purkas, and Mr. Inigo Jones, and signs himself "the Hierosolymitan--Syrian--Mesopotamian --Armenian--Median--Parthian--Persian--Indian--Leggestretcher of Odcomb in Somerset." The news he gives of "the most famigerated Region of all the East, the ample and large India," is various and occasionally incredible, but none the worse perhaps for that. You must allow the leg-stretcher to be something also of a leg-puller. The Great Mogul had elephant-fights twice a week, we learn. He might well do so if we could believe that he maintained three thousand of them "at an unmeasurable charge." Proceeding, nevertheless, to measure it, Coryat finds it works out at L10,000 a day, which is pretty good even for the Mogul. He also had a thousand wives, "whereof the chiefest (which is his Queene) is called Normal." I like her name. Coryat rode on an elephant, "determining one day (by God's leave) to have my picture expressed in my next book, sitting upon an elephant." But the voyage to the East was one too many for "the ingenious perambulator," and he died of a flux at Surat in December, 1617. Certain English merchants offered him refreshments. "Sack, sack, is there any such thing as sack? I pray you give me some sack." They did; the dysentery was upon him at the time. Even as Sir John might have done did he, and was buried "under a little monument." _Sic exit Coryatus_, says his biographer.

No sooner was he dead than his fellow Sireniacks fell upon his reputation and tore it to shreds.

He was the imp, whilst he on earth surviv'd,
From whom this West-World's pastimes were deriv'd;
He was in city, country, field and court
The well of dry-trimm'd jests, the pump of sport.

So writes the Water Poet. Another wag trounces his Crudities:

Tom Coriat, I have seen thy Crudities,
And methinks very strangely brewed it is,
With piece and patch together glued it is;
And now (like thee) ill-favour'd hued it is.
In many a line I see that lewd it is,
And therefore fit to be subdued it is--

and much more to the same effect.

Coryat's "natalitial place," as it happens, is very near to mine, and I find something to love in a man who can never forget it. He was a cockscomb, he was an ass; but he preferred the West of England to Italy. He called James I., our king, the "refulgent carbuncle of Christendom," and Prince Charles "the most glittering chrysolite of our English diademe" Both are hard sayings.

SHERIDAN AS MANIAC

All allowances made for the near alliance of great wits--"the lunatic, the lover, and the poet"--there comes a point where the vagaries of temperament overlap and are confounded, and where the historian, at least, must take a line. None of Sheridan's biographers, and he has had, as I think, more than his share, refer to an eclipse of his rational self which he undoubtedly suffered; probably because it was not made public until the other day. Yet there have always been indications of the truth, as when, on his death-bed, he told Lady Bessborough that his eyes would be looking at her through the coffin-lid. Being the woman she was, she probably believed him, or thought that she did. It is from her published letters that we may now understand what reason she had for believing him.

These letters are contained in the correspondence of Lord Granville Leveson-Gower, who was our Ambassador in Paris on and off between 1824 and 1841, a correspondence published in 1916, in two hefty volumes. The period covered is from 1781 to 1821, and the documents are mainly the letters to him of Lady Bessborough, which reveal a relation between the pair so curious that, to me, it is extraordinary that nobody should have called attention to them before. I can only account for that by considering that the letters, which are very long, and the volumes, which are very heavy, do not readily yield what store of sweetness they possess, and that those in particular of Lord Granville Gower have no store of sweetness to yield. They are the wooden letters of a wooden young man. He may have been a beautiful young man, and an estimable young man; but he was insensitive, dull, and a prig. The best things he ever did in his days were to be belettered by Lady Bessborough and married, finally, to her witty and sensible niece.

Meantime, there is no need to disguise the fact, since we have it in cold print, that the acquaintance of the couple, begun at Naples in 1794 as a flirtation, developed rapidly, on the lady's side, into a love affair which was only ended by her death. In 1794, when it all began, Lady Bessborough was thirty-two, had been married for fourteen years, and had four children. Granville Gower was twenty, well born, rich, exceedingly good-looking, and with no excuse for not knowing all about it. In fact, he knew it perfectly, and was not afraid to allude to himself as Antinous. We hear more than enough of his fine blue eyes from Lady Bessborough--and perhaps he did too. She, in her turn, was to hear, poor soul, more than her own heart could bear. All that need be said about that is that, being the woman she was, it was to be expected. And exactly what sort of woman she was she herself puts upon record, in April, 1812, in the following words:--

"_Pour la rarete du fait et la bizarrerie des hommes_, I must
put down what I dare tell nobody--I should be so much ashamed
of it were it not so ridiculous. At this present April, 1812,
in my fifty-first year, I am courted, follow'd, flatter'd, and
made love to _en toutes les formes_, by four men--two of them
reckoned sensible, and one of the two whom I have known half
my life--Lord Holland, Ward, young M----n, and little M----y.
Sir J.C. wanted to marry me when I was fifteen; so from that
time to this--36 years, a
pretty long life--I have heard or spoke that language; and for
17 years of it lov'd almost to Idolatry the only man from whom
I could have wish'd to hear it, the man who has probably lov'd
me least of all those who have profess'd to do so--tho' once I
thought otherwise."

Arrant sentimentalist, born and trained flirt, as this confession shows her to have been, it also shows that she lived to rue it. She rued more than that, for she was the mother of Lady Caroline Lamb; and if anything more need be said of her misfortunes, let it be added that she was sister to Georgiana of Devonshire. Nevertheless, it is impossible to read her letters with her wooden young lord without seeing that she had a good heart, if a very weak head. She loved much; and for those whom she loved--her sister, her children, Granville Gower--she was ready to dare all things, and fail in most. Of her husband there is nothing to tell, for she hardly names him, except to say that he has the gout. Not much is known of him, and nothing but good. Horace Walpole wrote of his marriage in 1780: "I know nothing to the prejudice of the young lady; but I should not have selected for so gentle and very amiable a man a sister of the empress of fashion, nor a daughter of the Goddess of Wisdom." The goddess of wisdom was her formidable and trenchant mother, Lady Spencer.

But I don't intend to follow the vain stages of her sentimental pilgrimage in pursuit of Lord Granville Gower's heart, vain because apparently the young man had not such an organ at her disposal. It was not, perhaps, for nothing that they exchanged reflections upon _Les Liaisons Dangereuses_. A new Choderlos de Laclos would get a new sentimental novel out of the Granville Gower correspondence; or it may be taken as it stands for a recovered Richardson, quite as long as _Sir Charles Grandison_ and much more amusing--for the poor lady is often witty. The affair dragged on, with much scandal, much whispering about it and about, until 1809, when the hero of it married Lady Harriet Cavendish, his mistress's niece. J.W. Ward, one of her lovers, according to her, sharply sums it up in a letter to Mrs. Dugald Stewart: "Lord Granville Leveson is going to marry Lady Harriet Cavendish. Lady Bessborough resigns, I presume, in favour of her niece. I have not heard what are supposed to be the secret articles of the treaty, but it must be a curious document." It was in 1812, as I have said, that she wrote out the pathetic confession of what we must suppose to have been the truth.

But I intended to write about Sheridan. This correspondence reveals him as the evil genius of Lady Bessborough's life; and perhaps, if all the truth were known, she may have been the evil genius of his, or one of them, anyhow. She had adventures with him behind her in 1794, when she began adventures anew; for they became intimate at Devonshire House, where, as the crony of Charles Fox, he was always at hand. The Duchess herself was one of his familiars. His initials for her, in letter-writing, were T.L., which a biographer pleasantly interprets as "True Love." The sisters, Countess and Duchess, shared in all good and evil things, and they seem to have shared Sheridan. His chosen initial for Lady Bessborough's address was "F," her second name being Frances. Mr. Sichel prints a letter from him to her, and guesses it to be of 1788. Extracts will suffice for the judicious: "I must bid 'oo good-night, for by the light passing to and fro near your room I hope you are going to bed and to sleep happily with a hundred little cherubs fanning their white wings over you in approbation of your goodness. Yours is the sweet, untroubled sleep of purity." It is to be feared that she could swallow this over-succulent stuff. A very little more will do for us: "And yet, and yet--Beware! Milton will tell you that even in Paradise serpents found their way to the ear of slumbering innocence. Then, to be sure, poor Eve had no watchful guardian to pace up and down beneath her windows.... And Adam, I suppose--was at Brooks's ... I shall be gone before your hazel eyes are open to-morrow...."

Lady Duncannon, as she was then, lived in Cavendish Square. Sheridan's leaguer of the house is thus betrayed. He never again left either her or it alone for long, but beset them until his death. Bitterly enough she was to rue that dalliance with the vainest sentimentalist ever begotten in Ireland or fostered in England. His wife, as lovely as a Muse and with the voice of a seraph, was to die; he was to adore, pursue, and capture another; but he never let Lady Bessborough go, and the antics of his mortified vanity were to lead her as far into the mire as any woman could go without suffocation. Such experiences may be common enough; it is rare to have them so nakedly portrayed as they are in this lady's letters, and not easy to avoid the conclusion that she made use of them to pique her wooden Antinous into some more active kind of pose than that of allowing himself to be adored.

Sheridan was forty-three and married to his second wife when Lady Bessborough fell in with Antinous at Naples; but it was not until the attachment of those two had become a notoriety that he began to make scenes about it. In 1798, when Granville Gower was in Berlin, Lady Bessborough writes to him that she had been at a concert at Sheridan's. "It was as pleasant as anything of the sort can be to me, as I sat by Fitzpatrick and Grey, who always amuse me. Sheridan says, when he found I did not come to town, he imagined that you had interdicted my coming till your return, and is always asking me whether what I am doing is allowed." That was March 12th; between that and the 17th she seems to have met Sheridan every day and nearly every night. "I must tell you, by the by ... that I am in great request this year.... I have had three _violent_ declarations of love--one from an old man, another from a very young one, and the third between the other two.... Pray come back. If you stay long in Prussia, Heaven knows what may happen."

In August of the same year she writes again. "Sheridan call'd in the morning and found out that I was alone, and told me he would dine with me. I thought, of course, he was in joke, but, _point du tout_, he arriv'd at dinner, dined, and stayed the whole evening. He was very pleasant, but--it was not you, and the seeing anybody only increas'd my regrets, which I suppose were pretty visible, for every five minutes he kept saying: 'How I am wasting all my efforts to entertain you, while you are grieving that you cannot change me into _Lord Leveson_. You would not be so grim if he was beaming on you.' At length, as I thought he was preparing to pass the night as well as the evening with me, and as he began to make some fine speeches I did not quite approve of, I order'd my Chair, to get rid of him. This did not succeed, for as I had no place to go to, he follow'd me about to Anne's and Lady D----'s, where I knew I should not be let in, and home again. But, luckily, I got in time enough to order every one to be denied, and ran upstairs, while I heard him expostulating with the porter...." It does not appear, from this narrative, that the hunted fair was seriously annoyed at being hunted, and the implication of Lord Granville in the unpleasant business is patent. Next year she has asked her persecutor to help Antinous at his election, for his reply, beginning "Dear Traitress," is given here.

After that, peace or silence, until 1802, when Sheridan changed his tactics.

"The opera was beautiful.... The Prince paid us two visits,
but our chief company were Hare, Grey, and Sheridan, the
latter persecuting me in every pause of the music and
telling me he knew such things of you, could give me such
incontrovertible proofs of your falsehood, and not only
falsehood but treachery to me, that if I had one grain of
pride or spirit left I should fly you. And guess what I
answered, you who call me jealous. I told him I had such
entire reliance on your faith, such confidence in your truth,
that I should doubt my own eyes if they witness'd against your
word. He pitied me, and said: 'How are the mighty fallen,' and
then went on telling me things without end to drive me mad."
That was in March. In August she writes, actually under siege:
"Here I am quite alone in C. Square ... no carriage to watch
for, no rap at the door ... and alas! no chance of hearing
your step upon the stair.... Whilst I was regretting all this,
suddenly, the knock did come, to my utter astonishment. I ran
to the stair, and in a moment heard Sheridan's voice. I do
not know why, but I took a horror of seeing him, and hurried
Sally down to say I was out. I heard him answer: 'Tell her I
call'd twice this morning, and want particularly to see her,
for I know she is at home.' Sally protested I was out, and S.
answered: 'Then I shall walk up and down before the door till
she comes in,' and there he is walking sure enough. It is
partly all the nonsense he talk'd all this year, and the
hating to see any one when I cannot see you, that makes me
dislike letting him in so much."

He solemnly did sentry-go for nearly an hour, she goes on to say. In that hour he was in his fifty-first year, she in her fortieth.

If she revealed these sorry doings to Antinous with the view of fanning embers, she did not succeed in drawing more than a languid protest from him. "As to Sheridan, in the morning I purposely staid in my room till the time of our setting out, and only saw him as I was getting into the carriage, so had nothing more to tell.... You say I am not angry enough. I am provok'd, vex'd, and asham'd. To feel more deeply I must care for the person who offends me...." I cannot myself read either vexation or shame in her reports. Provocation I can and do read--but it is not she who is provoked.

In 1804, Antinous in Petersburg, there are new antics to record. "You will think I live at the play; I am just return'd from Drury Lane.... Sheridan persists in coming every night to us. He says one word to my sister; then retires to the further corner of the box, where with arms across, deep and audible sighs, and sometimes _tears_! he remains without uttering and motionless, with his eyes fix'd on me in the most marked and distressing manner, during the whole time we stay. To-night he followed us in before the play begun, and remained as I tell you thro' the play and farce. As we were going I dropped my shawl and muff; he picked them up and with a look of ludicrous humility presented them to Mr. Hill to give me." And this was the author of _The School for Scandal_.

Next year, being that of Trafalgar, and Sheridan's fifty-fourth, he began a course of persecution which definitely marks an access of dementia. The affair took an acute turn suddenly, and I don't intend to say more about it than that it took the form of anonymous and obscene letters, some of them addressed to Lady Bessborough's daughter, Caroline, then a child, some to herself, some to the children of the Duchess of Devonshire. The letters, which continued throughout the year, were signed with the names of friends--a Mr. Hill, J.W. Ward, and others. Some were sent out signed with her name. The editor of the correspondence says that "Lady Bessborough was subsequently convinced by evidence which appeared to her conclusive that Sheridan was the writer." There can be no doubt of that whatever, and as all the detail is in the published correspondence, little more need be said. The wooden Antinous, in Petersburg, for his sole comment, writes as follows: "I learn with sorrow that you are still subjected to vexations from anonymous letters, etc. I suppose that Sheridan is the author, though one would have imagined that, however depraved his morals, and however malignant might be his mind, he would have had _good taste_ enough not to have resorted to such a species of vengeance." And that was all the fire to be blown into Antinous. "Good taste" in the circumstances is comic.

By the end of the season of the same year, however, Sheridan seems to have found out what he had done, and Lady Bessborough also sufficient self-respect to have helped him find it out. This is what happened on July 12th, at a ball. "I sat between Prince Adolphus and Mr. Hill at supper; Sheridan sat opposite, looking by turns so supplicating and so fiercely at me that everybody round observ'd it and question'd me about it. I could only say what was so, that he was very drunk. When I got up, he seiz'd my arm as I pass'd him, begging me to shake hands with him. I extricated myself from his grasp and pass'd on; he soon after follow'd and began loudly reproaching me for my _cruelty_, and asking why I would not shake hands. I was extremely distress'd, but at last told him his own sagacity might explain to him why I never would, and that his conduct to-night did not tend to alter my determination. I then hurried out of the room, and by way of completely avoiding him, cross'd a very formal circle of old ladies, and went and seated myself between Lady Euston and Lady Beverly. He had the impudence to follow me, and in face of the whole circle to enter into a loud explanation of his conduct, begging my pardon for all the offences he had ever committed against me, either on this night or in former times, and assuring me that he had never ceased loving, _respecting_ and adoring me, and that I was the only person he ever really loved...." "Think," she says, "of the dismay of all the formal ladies." But the formal ladies, no doubt, had every reason to know their Devonshire House set; and if society in 1805 would allow Sheridan to be drunk and stay at a ball, it would prefer him maudlin drunk to drunk and disorderly. One is bound to add, too, that Lady Bessborough was a fool, though that, to be sure, is no excuse for Sheridan proving himself both old blackguard and old fool in one.

Next year the Duchess died, and her sister's active persecution appears to have ceased. But Sheridan by no means let her alone. On the contrary, he had the assurance to send as intercessor no less a person than the Prince Regent. "The Prince sent so repeatedly to me, and has been throughout so kind and feeling that I thought it wrong to persist in refusing to see him, so to-day he came soon after two and stayed till six!... He gave me a very pretty emerald ring, which he begg'd me to wear, _to bind still stronger the tie of Brotherhood which he has always claim'd_. In the midst of all this he brought me a message from Sheridan." This, which she describes as a "well-timed Petition for Forgiveness," she had the prudence to wave aside. She said that she had no wish to injure him, and only asked him to keep out of her way, or, if they happened to meet, to cease to persecute her. And that was very well, or would have been so, if she had had any character at all, a quality which she unfortunately had not. In 1807, the following year, she goes out to spend the evening with her daughter, Lady Caroline, now married to William Lamb. "The entrance is, you know, very dark; to my dismay, I saw a ruffian-like looking man following me into the house. I hasten'd upstairs, but to my great dismay he also ascended and enter'd the room immediately after me. It was so dark I could not at first make out who he was. When I did, I was not the better pleas'd with his establishing himself and passing the whole evening with us; but much as I was displeased with him, I was still more so with myself for being unable to resist laughing and appearing entertained (he was so uncommonly clever), tho' I persevered in my determination of not speaking to him. I do not like his having got the entree there, and think him, even old as he is, a dangerous acquaintance for Caroline. Of course you perceive it was Sheridan." Considering that she suspected him of having written and sent grossly indecent letters to that girl of hers, one would have said that he was even more than a dangerous acquaintance. Light-mindedness here spills over into something rather worse. However, there he was, established, and it was no way to dispossess him to laugh at his jokes.

I must now invite the reader to a farce, and, if he can forget that Sheridan was a grandfather and fifty-six, a very good farce it is. It is 1807, the 28th July. Lady Bessborough is staying with her daughter for her first confinement, and receives a message from Mrs. Sheridan, a rather wild young woman in her way, known to all Devonshire House as Hecca. She goes at midnight,

"... and was carried up to her bedroom, where we had not sat
long when a violent burst at the door announc'd the arrival
of Sheridan, not perfectly sober. The most ridiculous scene
ensued--that is, ridiculous it would have been if I had not
felt myself too indignant and disgusted to be entertain'd. He
began by asking my pardon, entreating my mercy and compassion,
saying that he was a wretch, and was even at that moment more
in love with _me_ than with any woman he had ever met with, on
which Hecca exclaimed: 'Not excepting me? Why, you always tell
me that I am the only woman you were ever in love with.'
'So you are, to be sure, my dear Hecca; you know _that_, of
course--you _know_ that I love you better than anything
on earth.' '_Except_ her!' 'Pish, pish, child! Do not talk
nonsense.' Then he began again at me, upbraiding me for my
cruelty, both for quarrelling with him and setting Hecca
against him. The first, I said, I did in my own defence, the
other was false, Hecca every now and then coming in with:
'Why, S----, I thought Lady B---- pursued you, and that you
reviled all her violence like a second Joseph? So you us'd
to tell me.' I cannot give you all the conversation, for it
lasted till near three in the morning.... Getting away was the
difficulty; he wanted to come down with me, and seiz'd my arm
with such violence once before Hecca, that I was obliged to
call her maid to help me, and at last only escaped by locking
him in."

This sort of thing happened once more, in the same year, at Brocket. On this occasion Sheridan pursued his victim into the nursery, and threw himself on his knees. It gave Lady Bessborough an opportunity which even she could not fail to perceive--and she used it. "I interrupted the most animated professions by showing him the child and asking him if his grandchildren were as pretty as mine. He jump'd up, but with such fury in his looks that I was really frighten'd..." And that may very well be the end: _solvuntur tabulae risu_. Lord Granville Gower married in 1809, and the confidential correspondence died the death; but Sheridan lingered until 1816, and actually carried on his desperate pursuit within three days of the end. She visited him, and described what took place to Lord Broughton. He assured her, she said, that he should visit her after his death. She asked, "Why, having persecuted her all her life, would he now carry it into death?' 'Because I am resolved you shall remember me.'"[A] The story of his telling her that his eyes would see her through the coffin-lid is well known, and may be apocryphal; but the melodrama is Sheridan all over.

[Footnote A: Mr. Sichel, in his monumental book on Sheridan, doubts the lady's memory, one of his grounds of doubt being that Sheridan "would not have been likely to have thus behaved before his wife." But Mr. Sichel did not then know what Sheridan was capable of doing before his wife.]