Lady Morgan resolutely entered on life again, determined not to be more unhappy than she could possibly help. The sense of her loneliness, her inward sorrow was never entirely absent from her thoughts; but she endeavoured to stifle it, and in some measure succeeded—at least, when she was in society.
July, 1844.—Another gone—poor Campbell! Oh for the day that I first saw him
led in by Sir Thomas Lawrence, up the
great dining-room of the Priory (Stanmore), in the middle of one of the great
Saturday dinners! I was seated between Lord
Aberdeen and Manners
Sutton—the latter gave Campbell his seat
beside me—opposite to us was Lord
Erskine, and the Duchess of
Gordon. Campbell was awkward, but went on
taking his soup as if he was eating a haggis in the Highlands; but when he put
his knife in the salt-cellar to help himself to salt, every eyeglass was up,
and the first poet of the age was voted the vulgarest of
| FIRST YEARS OF WIDOWHOOD. | 485 |
My kind old friend, Horace Twiss (by-the-bye what a pair of coxcombs he and I were when we first met in the salons of Cork and Charleville), has just sent me, most kindly, his Life of Eldon, and with a flattering word of presentation to boot. It is an honest book, for the author believes every word he advances, in form of faith or opinion, and it is the work of a gentleman and a scholar, and of a good artist, too, for he knows his craft. His personal partiality for Eldon, though apparent, is never officious. He is above his subject—a narrow-minded, timid, and unenlightened man. Horace Twiss’s text is clear and brief, and in the best taste and style.
In the autumn Lady Morgan paid a visit to Boulogne; her account of it to her niece, Mrs. Geale, shows that, although she kept down all manifestations of depression and sorrow, she felt her changed and lonely situation very acutely. It alludes to the precarious state of Lady Clarke’s health, which gave fears for another grief in prospect. She says:—
| 486 | LADY MORGAN'S MEMOIR. |
You have long since heard of my melancholy illness—utterly alone, and in a foreign hotel; and I really believe that if Sir Joseph Lafanu had not arrived I should have been at peace by this. What a curious proof of the incoherency of all things—to have lived for my family, and to have died without one of its members near! But above all, I missed the one who had been so long the comfort and saviour of my life! Still I acknowledge, with gratitude, the most kind and charitable attentions of the humane and kind strangers I have found here—among them, Lady Banks and her sweet, good girls; Lady Dundonald, the Cochranes, Storys, and many others. Lord Wellesley calls often at my door, offers me his carriage, and has ordered his gamekeeper to supply me. Still I am longing to get back to England, and was to have sailed yesterday, only Sir Joseph thought me too weak to run the risk of sea-sickness.
The health of Lady Clarke had been failing for some time, her state was causing deep anxiety. In the following extract from a letter, describing a mesmeric sitting, Lady Morgan shows how she was endeavouring to cheat herself into hope, and to keep the impending sorrow out of sight.
If you could recover your sleep without opiates you would soon be quite well. Mesmerism does this. I am going to Doctor Ashburner’s to-day, to witness an exhibition solely on your account (for you know my organ of anti-humbugism). I shall be able to tell you more to-morrow on this head.
| FIRST YEARS OF WIDOWHOOD. | 487 |
Monday.—Now, here is a full and true account. “Well,
my dear, our party consisted of the Marchioness of
Hastings (a very fine woman, and going to be married to Captain Hastings, Henry, her cousin), both the
Henrys and Colonel Lumley—all believers,—and two sceptics,
Lady Morgan and the Rev. Charles Darley, who gave themselves great airs. Lord Anglesey was invited, and tried to come, but could
not get out of an engagement. We were all vastly clever at dinner, when at the dessert
enter a lovely little girl about twelve years old, in cloak and bonnet, which being
doffed, she was brought forward as “little Jane,” and
presented to Lady Hastings (the queen mesmeriser of London).
“Little Jane” looked modest, simple, and childish,
until Lady Hastings, drawing her closely to her, fixed her fine
eyes on hers, and in a few minutes the child fell back as in a swoon. Dr. Ashburner caught her, and then she stood fast
asleep at the table, her eyes shut, but looking flushed and fussy, and talking under
the influence of any organ on which Lady Hastings pressed her
fingers. The first was music, and she sang all sorts of scraps of songs sweetly, but
incorrectly! but when Clifford Henry joined her in My Father’s Marble Hall, she flew
into a rage and said, “you put me out of tune.” Then came the organ of
affection, and she nearly suffocated Lady Hastings with caresses,
and threw herself into the Doctor’s arms, and ran round the table and poked every
one together, and was, upon the whole, so tender that the Rev. Charles
Darley and I got alarmed. The next organ touched was self-esteem, acted
to the life, and when I said, “Oh,
| 488 | LADY MORGAN'S MEMOIR. |
She was then de-mesmerised, and was again modest and childlike, and said she hoped she had not done anything rude, or sang an improper song; “I hope I shall soon be married.” The two sceptics decided it was acting equal to Mrs. Jordan’s. When the men came up, after dinner, act the second: I assisted to paste black sticking plaster over her eyes, so her seeing was impossible. The Doctor, standing behind her, held his folded hands over her eyes, and Darley and I held a book open to her page after page; she read all, but complained of the small print. Sceptics startled; she sang scraps of songs. She frequently said to me, “that lady is a sceptic”
Act third. Lady Hastings insisted on Clifford Henry being mesmerised, and this was no joke, but a perfect exhibition of poor humanity exposed to an influence over which it had no control, and which subjected it to external impressions which left it but a complicated piece of machinery.
I now tell you all I saw, but as to my faith, it rests much where
my ignorant interests left it some years ago. That the powers of magnetism and
electricity are great, and may be beneficially applied in medical practice, I believe
there is no doubt, and that they
| FIRST YEARS OF WIDOWHOOD. | 489 |
The next entry in the journal is a sad one. The sorrow she had feared had fallen upon her.
Sunday, April 27.—The re-opening of my Doomsday Book, after a struggle of nearly two years; submitting to the grave law of necessity by which all known things are governed, I have endeavoured to make head against that prostrating melancholy which poisons and embitters life, but does not destroy it, and to live in that world I could not leave by any voluntary act (for mine is not a suicidal temperament). Now I am again crushed by the last of the two greatest calamities that could befal me in this life. My noble-minded and affectionate sister, my first friend and earliest companion, with whom I had struggled through a precarious youth. My beloved Olivia is no more! I open this page in my Doomsday Book to note this; but I cannot go on, three of the dearest and the best in two years; it is too terrible.
April 29.—All is now over in Dublin, and the
| 490 | LADY MORGAN'S MEMOIR. |
So I reel on! the world is my gin or opium, I take it for a few hours per diem, excitement, intoxication, absence! I return to my desolate home, “and awaken to all the horrors of sobriety.” My impressionableness of spirits, my debility of body, my sight dim from nervousness, my heart palpitating at the least movement; and yet I am accounted the “agreeable rattle of the great ladies’ coterie,” and I talk pas mal to many clever men all day. This is surely mechanism, for it is done without effort on the voluntary system, and yet, when alone, books, pictures, flowers, everything has the touch of death on it, and that park so near me, of which my beloved Morgan used to say, “It is ours more than the queen’s, we use it daily and enjoy it nightly!”—that park that I worked so hard to get an entrance into, I never walk in, it seems to me covered with black crape.
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