Miss Eden's Letters Part 23

E. E.

_Miss Eden to Miss Villiers._

[GREENWICH.]

(_Friday_). I began this two days ago, and you see how far I went. I have a pa.s.sion at the moment for modelling in clay, an accomplishment I am trying to acquire from an old German who lives on Blackheath. The interest of the pursuit it is impossible to describe. I cannot imagine why I ever did anything else; it is the worst _engouement_ I ever had, and so entirely past all regulating, that I think the best way now is to tire it out, so I model from morning to night. I wish I were not obliged to write to you, you uninteresting, unfinished lump of clay.

George interests himself in the art, and with his usual amiability stepped up to town and brought me some tools. Think of our going to sit down to dinner the other day, in our accustomed domestic manner, soup and a mutton-pie; and Lord and Lady Jersey, F. Villiers, and Lord Castlereagh arrived _at_ seven for dinner. No entrees, no fish, no nothing, and the cook ill. However, it turned out very pleasant.

I believe Lady E. Cowper will end by marrying Lord Ashley. She says she never has felt a preference for anybody, and will do just what her mother wishes. Lady Cowper is sorely puzzled, and he is in a regular high-flown Ashley state, wis.h.i.+ng he had never proposed, that he might have watched over and adored her in silence.

_Miss Eden to Miss Villiers._

NORMAN COURT, _Monday [October 1829]._

MY DEAREST THERESA, I do not find this visiting system good for the growth of letters. I have less to say when I see fresh people and fresh houses constantly, than at home, where I see the same every day. Your last letter, too, gave me an inspiration to answer it on the spot, but I had not time then, and so it subsided. You poor dear! Are you still liable to be haunted by recollections and tormented by the ghosts of past pleasures--youthful but weak? I have _had_ so many feelings of the sort you mean, that your letter interested me particularly; but then it must be at least five years since the last ghost of the last pleasure visited me, so imagine the date of the pleasure by the date of the ghost--and the remains of _youthful_ interests do not disturb me any longer. It is always _childhood_ I return to, and exclusively the sight of Eden Farm[330] and aught connected therewith that swells my heart to bursting, and _that_ I never see now. Everything else is mended up again, and for the life of me I cannot understand how I ever could have been so sentimental and foolish as it appears I must have been.[331] I say no more; but my old extract book has thrown me into fits of laughter. Calculate from that fact the horrid and complete extinction of sentiment that has taken place. You will come to it, and be surprised to see what a happy invention life is. I am afraid I like it too much. We have been at Shottesbrook. Caroline Vansittart is so uncommonly well; there are hardly any traces of her illness. The dear children will be children till they die of old age.

Then we went to Ewehurst which the Drummonds have rented from the Duke of Wellington. It is a very fine place, but an old house, and so cold.

All the children had colds, and all the Aunts caught them, of course; only, instead of catching one cold I caught six, and have done nothing but sneeze ever since.

We stayed there a week and came here this day sen'night, found the house more luxurious and comfortable than ever after the cold of Ewehurst, and Mr. Wall in great felicity. Old Mrs. Wall I think much the most delightful old lady I ever knew. Lady Harriet we found here, and the Sturts, and the Poodles,[332] and Mr. Pierpont, and latterly we have had a Doctor Daltrey, a very clever man who has thrown a pinch of sense into the very frivolous giggling conversation we have sunk into.

It has been rather amusing. Lady C. Sturt[333] and Lady Harriet are rather in the same style of repartee. We all meant to dislike the former, but found her, on the contrary, very pleasant. She amused George very much, and Mr. Sturt was an old friend of ours. We should have gone on to Crichel,[334] but our time and theirs could not be brought together. Lady Harriet is in her very best mood, and I always think it is a very pleasant incident, such excessive buoyancy of spirits. She is full as fidgety about Bingham as any wife would be, even any of my own sisters, who have a system of fidgeting about their husbands. I think he will arrive to-day. In fact he could hardly have come sooner if he set off even the very day he meant to. She insists upon it he is naturalized in Russia and has taken the name of Potemkin, and she is teaching the child[335] to call him so:--"Come, dear; say Potemkin. Come, out with it like a man! Potty, Potty, Potty--come Baby!"

To-day we are to have a dinner of neighbours, chiefly clergy; two Chancellors of different dioceses and various attendant clergy, besides dear little Arundell who dines here every day. We flatter ourselves there will be great difficulties of precedence when we go into dinner, and have at last settled that the two Chancellors go in hand in hand like the Kings of Brentford, and that we must divide the inferior clergy amongst us--take two apiece.

Mr. Wall sometimes gets frightened at our levities and fancies we shall really say to his guests all that we propose for them.

George still gets into hysterical fits of laughter when I mention your idea of his being in love with Lady Harriet, which was unlucky at that time, for it did so happen that he could not endure her then, and he went up to town the day she came to stay at Greenwich, because he thought her so ill-natured. She happened to abuse, in her ignorance, _the_ lady of the hour. But even he likes her here, thinks her very amusing, and much better-hearted than he expected, and he, like you, no longer wonders why I like her. Altogether this visit has answered.

Sister has been to Wrest, where the old stories are going on:--doctors sent for the middle of the night. In her last letter she said she believed that the G.o.derichs were going off at an hour's notice, and that she should be left alone at Wrest, till she could alter all her plans.

In the meantime there is nothing really the matter with the child.

You never tell me where to direct. I shall try Saltram.[336] Love to Mrs. Villiers. Ever your most affectionate

E. E.

_Miss Eden to Lady Charlotte Greville._[337]

MELBURY, 1829.

I am sorry to write to you on paper that has evidently been in bad health for some time, but I cannot find any without this bilious tinge.

Lady Bath told me that you were the giver of that pretty lamp in the drawing-room at Greenwich Park. I am so glad to know who it is I am to thank, and very glad that "who" is "you." I tried a little of grat.i.tude on two other friends who seemed obtuse about it. The pride of my life is the quant.i.ty of pretty things that my friends gave me when we settled. I like your name to be found in the list.

I suppose you are still in Ireland, and I direct my letter on that supposition. I have not written to any of your family for a long time. I cannot write while I am travelling about, as I hold it "stuff of the conscience" to comment on the owners of the houses I am in, and it would not be the least amusing to hear they were all charming people.

However, I must say that about Lord Ilchester, as I believe you do not know him, so it is news to you; and he certainly is the most amiable being I ever beheld. He has given up his own happiness as a lost case since the death of his wife,[338] and his whole life is spent in trying to make other people happy. I never saw so _gentle_ a character, and am no longer surprised at George's attachment to him. It has lasted ever since they were at school together; and as I had never seen much of Lord Ilchester at home, and he was nothing s.h.i.+ning in society, I used to wonder why George was so very fond of him. But I see how it is now.

To be sure, an inch of amiability is worth yards of cleverness for the real wear and tear of life. Lord Ilchester's spirits have been thoroughly bent down once by the loss of his wife, and though he has mended himself up again to a certain degree, yet he is all over c.h.i.n.ks and cracks, that shake on the slightest touch. I could not bear to allude before him to the possibility of any husband liking his wife, or any mother educating her children. The quant.i.ty of _celibataires_ that I bring forward in conversation is incredible. I hope he is quite convinced that there is not such a thing as a married man left in creation.

Mr. Corry, who is here, does not intend that the race shall be extinct.

He is desperately in love with Lady H. Ashley,[339] so desperately that he can think of nothing else, and I believe talks of little else; but between his brogue and the confusion of his ideas I am not always sure what he is talking about. He never sleeps, but writes half the night--whether sonnets to her, or pamphlets on the state of Ireland, he will not tell me. But he is in a constant state of composition, writing notes all the evening to be arranged into sense at night. From the dark romantic hints he throws out for our information, I imagine he has hopes of marrying her in the course of next year. I hope he will not be disappointed. I like anybody who is so really in earnest as he is.

We paid a long visit at Longleat--very successful, inasmuch as Lady Bath was in the highest of good humour, and Tom Bath is dearer to my heart than ever. Lord Edward was at Longleat the latter part of our visit, and a great addition. He is totally unlike all the Thynnes I ever saw--full of fun and dashes out everything that comes into his head, astonishes them all, but governs the whole house. They all laugh the instant he opens his lips.

CHAPTER VIII

1830-1831

_Miss Eden to Miss Villiers._

_Sat.u.r.day, January 1830._

MY DEAREST THERESA, I _did_ write the day I had your first letter. To be sure you were not bound to know it, for I put my letter by so carefully, that at post time it was entirely missing. Then I was _took_ with a cold, and took to my bed, and by the time I was well enough to inst.i.tute a successful search for my lost letter, it had grown so dull and dry by keeping that it was not worth sending.

So you are snowed up at an inn. Odd! Your weather must be worse than ours, though that has been bad enough, but no great depths of snow. I think you sound comfortable. I have the oddest love of an Inn; I can't tell why, except that I love all that belongs to travelling; and then one is so well treated. I have nothing to tell you, as I wrote a very disgustingly gossipy letter to Lady Harriet [Baring] which was to serve you too, and I have seen n.o.body since, except the Granthams. I suppose there are live people in the provinces; there are none in town--no carriages--no watchmen--no noise at all.

We had four London University professors to dinner on Thursday (and Mr.

Brougham was to have come, but was, of course, detained), proving that madmen were sane or some clever men mad--I forget which. However, our Professors were _very_ pretty company. I did not understand a word they said, but thought them very pleasant.

Have you read Moore?[340] So beyond measure amusing! It is abused and praised with a violence that shows how much party feeling there is about it. The vanity both of the writer and the writee is very remarkable, but it does not prevent the book from being very amusing, and I think it altogether a very _fair_ piece of biography. Moore was not bound to make Lord Byron's faults stand out; there are plenty of them and striking enough without amplification, and he mentions them with such excuses as he can find.

George goes to Woburn to-morrow for the last week of shooting. Lord Edward Thynne's marriage went off--because the butcher would not be _conformable_ about settlements.[341] I am sorry, for I liked Edward very much when we were at Longleat. He is quite unlike the others, so lively and easy. I wish he had not equally bad luck in the line of fortune-hunting. Dublin must be going into deep black for your brother, to judge by the papers.[342] I wonder whether Popular mourning is like Court mourning--the gentlemen to wear black swords and fringe, and the ladies chamois shoes--two great mysteries to me. I am so glad he has been so liked. Your most affectionate

E. E.

_Miss Eden to Miss Villiers._

GROSVENOR STREET, _Thursday, April 1830._

MY DEAREST THERESA, Observe how we write! Not a moment lost, and I shall have the last word, but I meant to write to you yesterday, because the very morning after my last letter, I found by a confidential advice from Longleat that I had forwarded to you a regular London lie about Edward Thynne, and that his marriage, so far from being off, was negotiating with great success. However, it was a secret then; but Lord Henry came yesterday to tell me it was declared, and to-day I have a letter from Lady Bath, apparently in ecstacies: "Write and wish me great joy. You are the first, the _very first_, to whom I have written my dear Edward's marriage, and I know you will be pleased. Write to me directly."

I am not at all pleased, and have not an idea what to write. I think if Edward had been thirty-three instead of twenty-three, had _wearied_ of the world, as the Scotch say, and been disappointed in love several times, as all people are by that time, it would not have been unnatural that he should have married for an establishment; but a boy of that age has no right to be so calculating. I cannot quite make out the story. I heard from a great friend of the family who had been employed in the negotiation that it is the sick plain sister[343] Lord E. marries; that he did not pretend to care about her; supposed if he saw her once before their marriage it would be enough--and so on, which was disgusting.

Lord Henry yesterday carried it off better--said she was rather pretty, well educated, well mannered, and that Edward was in love, and all the right things. Perhaps he is right. I did not know what to tell you about Longleat, it was so long ago. I do not think _your_ Barings[344] will like Lord Henry's present pursuit. The same name and the other family; but do not for your life say a word of it to them, as I vowed the deepest vows to him yesterday that I would not do him any mischief. Not that I know how I could, and I would not if I could, but I presume he dreads family communications which, as the A. Barings and H. Barings do not speak, I laboured to convince him yesterday were not to be dreaded.

I am quite alone here, George went to Woburn Monday, and f.a.n.n.y to Eastcombe. I have just cold enough left to excuse myself from dining out with my attached friends and family, so that I see a few morning visitors and have the evenings all to myself. The pleasure of it no words can express. I never can explain what is the fun of being alone in the room with the certainty of not being disturbed; but that there is something very attractive and pleasing in the situation it is impossible to deny. I feel so happy, and sit up so late, and am so busy about nothing.

I had a remarkably pleasant set of visitors yesterday. Your brother George, amongst others, followed Lord Henry, and as usual I was enchanted to see him.

Good-bye dearest. I wish you were come. Your most affectionate