June.—Is it possible that I am again restored to health and sight. My dear Morgan is well and hearty, and Olivia better.
Soirées, operas, concerts, à discretion, which we (old fools as we are) enjoy à l’indiscretion! Well, so here I am, taking a new lease of life, available for any length of time, with a peppercorn fine, which is about the worth what we give in return. And here, if I open my journal again, it shall be to write something new and pleasant.
My life may be deemed a frivolity for one of my age, but no, it is a philosophy, a profound and just philosophy, founded upon the wisdom of the principle, to do and enjoy all the good I can, while I submit to the penalty of that mystery called life.
Some of the “young Englanders” have just been here; they might as well have been New Zealanders, for any advance they make in the art of thinking. But they are good boys, of the school of Tommy Goodchild, in the Universal Spelling Book, and they know it. All little “Jack Horners” in their way,
“Who put in his thumb, And pulled out a plumb. And said what a good boy am I!” |
Their plumb is a green-gage, poor
dears! I knew the firstlings of this school of good boys, some thirty years
| 476 | LADY MORGAN'S MEMOIR. |
Sidney Smith has been in the Thames Tunnel, and sent me his experiences:—
I had fully intended, my dear madam, to have been of your party to-night; but I went to the Thames Tunnel, and have destroyed myself by walking under the river, and descending and ascending one hundred and twenty steps; there was a suffocating heat and a want of ventilation for which I was not prepared. I am astonished the Thames submits to the insult; one day or another it will come down upon the subaqueous intruders with all the force of a basin of water flung from the seventh story of a house in Edinburgh.
PS.—Mrs. Sidney (ill with the influenza) desires me to say that she depends upon Sir C. Morgan and you for Thursday; I beg you will keep away from the Tunnel in the interim.
| ALBERT GATE CONCEDED—1842. | 477 |
June 30th.—One of the most wretched days of my life—bad letter from Ireland.
“Yet love hopes on, when reason would despair.” |
My dear, dear Olivia; my hereafter in this world—gentle, spiritual, intellectual, full of the finest affections—unselfish beyond all comparison! My beloved Morgan said to me, as I wept over Dr. Carmichael’s letter—“Oh, Sydney, if you grieve thus for a niece, whom you never see much of, what is to become of you if I were to go?” This dreadful idea consoled me. How strange—my present loss appeared less; my beloved husband took me off to Richmond, and I came back in better spirits, and again full of hope—and Morgan beside me.
In Richmond Park we sat under an old tree, within view of the Mount where Henry VIII. stood when a cannon announced to him the decapitation of Anne Boleyn.
