Old Woman's Gossip

XIV.

JAMES STREET, BUCKINGHAM GATE, } May 2d. )

MY DEAREST H——: I received your kind letter the other night (that is, morning) on my return from a ball, and read your reflections on dissipation with an attention heightened by the appropriate comment of a bad headache and abject weariness from top to toe with dancing. The way in which people prosecute their pleasures in this good town of London is certainly amazing; and we are (perforce) models of moderation, compared with most of our acquaintance. I met at that very ball persons who had been to one and two parties previously, and were leaving that dance to hurry to another. Independently of the great fatigue of such a life, it seems to me so strange that when people are enjoying themselves to their hearts’ content in one place, they cannot be satisfied to remain there until they wish to return home, but spend half the night in the streets, running from one house to another, working their horses to death, and wasting the precious time when they might be DANCING. You see my folly is not so great but that I have philosophy to spare for my neighbors. Let me tell you again, dear H——, how truly I rejoice in your niece’s restored health. I cannot conceive anything more interesting than the sources of enjoyment which must at every moment present themselves in a young existence whose powers of pleasure have been suspended for so long a time. The spring, too, is the very time for such a resurrection, when every day and every hour, every cloud and every flower, offer inexhaustible matter for the capabilities of delight thus regained. Indeed, “ the drops on the trees are the most beautiful of all! ” [E——T——’s exclamation during one of her first drives after the long imprisonment of her nervous malady.] A wonderful feeling of

renewed hope seems to fill the heart of all created things in the spring, and even here in this smoky town it finds its way to us, inclosed as we are by brick walls, dusty streets, and all things unlovely and unnatural. I stood yesterday in the little court behind our house, where two unhappy poplars and a sycamore-tree were shaking their leaves as if in surprise at the acquisition and to make sure they had them, and looked up to the small bit of blue sky above them with pleasurable spring tears in my eyes. How I wish I were rich and could afford to be out of town now! I always dislike London, and this lovely weather gives me a sort of mal du pays for the country. My dearest H——, you must not dream of leaving Ardgillan just when I am coming to see you; that would be indeed a disappointment. My father is not at home at this moment, but I shall ask him before I close this letter the exact time when we shall be in Dublin. I look forward with much pleasure to making my aunt Dall known to you. She is, I am happy to say, coming with me, for indeed she is in some sense my all the world. You have often heard me speak of her, but it is difficult for words to do justice to one whose whole life is an uninterrupted stream of usefulness, goodness, and patient devotion to others. I know but one term that, as the old writers say, “ delivers ” her fully, and though it is not unfrequently applied, I think she is the only person I know who really deserves it; she is absolutely unselfish. Old maids are vulgarly taxed with sourness and discontent. I know nothing of the justice of such a charge. It may be founded in more general observation than mine, but if it were true as a rule (of which I have only seen the exception), something of it must surely be attributed to a forlorn and isolated position; and the consciousness of the stigma absurdly affixed to their condition in itself must tend to make them techy and nervously sensitive to the undeserved ridicule attaching to them. I wonder if this contempt for old maids is of Jewish extraction. You know they always speak of marrying and bearing children as a woman’s reproach being taken from her ; and the ladies who have children are invariably so impertinent to those who have not. The importance of the tribe depending upon its numbers, I suppose the mother of men was naturally held in honor; but among many nations vowed virginity has been honored above maternity. In any case, I do not see why we English are always to speak of old maids with a sneer; and when to the disconsolate prospect of an uncompanioned life and solitary age is added the melancholy retrospect of a disastrous early attachment (as is often the case), there is something in the name of “ old maid ” which seems to me to command both respect and commiseration. Perhaps it is a sort of presentiment that I shall one day be hailed by the title myself that inclines me to be civil to it; but my experience of the species, instead of suggesting the usual train of worries, fidgets, fusses, and unamiable peculiarities generally conjured up by the words “ old maid,” presents the image of the kindest soul and cheerfulest good human being that ever dedicated her life to the comfort and happiness of those around her. I am sure, dear H——, you will excuse this panegyric, though you do not know how well it is deserved; the proof of its being so is that there is not one of us but would say the same of aunt Dall.

My father’s benefit took place last Wednesday, when I acted Isabella; the house was crowded and the play very successful; I think I played it well, and I take credit to myself for so doing, for I dislike both play and part extremely. The worst thing I do in it is the soliloquy when I am about to stab Biron, and the best, my death. My dresses were very beautiful, and I am exceedingly glad the whole thing is over. I suppose it will be my last new part this season. I am reading with great pleasure a purified edition, just published, of the old English dramatists; the work, as far as my ignorance of the original plays will enable me to judge, seems very well executed, and I owe the editor many thanks for some happy hours spent with his book. I have just heard something which annoys me not a little: I am to prepare to act Mrs. Haller. I know very well that nobody was ever at liberty in this world to do what they liked and that only; but when I know with what task-like feeling I set about most of my work, I am both amused and provoked when people ask me if I do not delight in acting. I have not an idea what to do with that part; however, I must apply myself to it, and try; such mawkish sentiment and such prosaic, commonplace language seem to me alike difficult to feel and to deliver.

My dear H——, I shall be in Ireland the whole month of July. I am coming first to Dublin, and shall afterwards go to Cork. You really must not be away when I come, for if you are, I won’t come, which is good Irish, is n’t it? I do not feel as you do, at all, about the sea. Instead of depressing my spirits, it always raises them; it seems to me as if the vast power of the great element communicated itself to me. I feel strong, as I run by the side of the big waves, with something of their strength, and the same species of wild excitement which thunder and lightning produce in me always affects me by the sea-shore. I never saw the sea but once violently agitated, and then I was so well pleased with its appearance that I took a boat and went out into the bustle, singing with all my might, which was the only vent I could find for my high spirits; it is true that I returned in much humiliation, very seasick, after a very short “ triumph of Galatea,” indeed.

You ask me in one of your last why I do not send you verses any more, as I used to do, and whether I still write any. So here I send you some which I improvised the other day in your honor, and which, written hurriedly as they were, will not, I think, stand the test of any very severe criticism: —

I never go anywhere without a book wherein I my scratch mv valuable ideas, and therefore when we meet I will show you my present receptacle. I take great delight in writing, and write less incorrectly than I used to do. I have not time now to go on with this letter, and as I am anxious you should know when to expect us, I shall not defer it in the hope of making it more amusing, though I fear it is rather dull. But you will not mind that, and will believe me ever your affectionate FANNY KEMBLE.

The arrangement of Massinger for the family library by my friend the Reverend Alexander Dyce, the learned Shakespearean editor and commentator, was my first introduction to that mine of dramatic wealth which enriched the literature of England in the reigns of Elizabeth and James the First, and culminated in the genius of Shakespeare. It is by comparison with them, his contemporaries, that we arrive at a just estimate of his supremacy; the extraordinary vigor and force and almost total absence of grace and beauty of their writings, viewed with reference to his, suggest the idea of the huge Titanic Torso compared with the divine humanity of the Apollo Belvedere. Some years ago, there appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes (I rather think from the pen of M. Montegut) a very poetical and ingenious paper on the subject of Shakespeare, his predecessors and contemporaries. The whole article, more like a German than a French one in the thorough acquaintance it displayed with the early literature of the English stage, was full of fine and just discrimination and appreciation of the particular genius of the several members of the remarkable company of playwrights of which Shakespeare was the preëminent head, and ended with a comparison of them all to the dramatis personœ of his Tempest and of himself to Prospero, which was full of critical judgment, taste, and imagination. I was so enchanted with these plays of Massinger’s, but more especially with the one called The Maid of Honor, that I never rested till I had obtained from the management its revival on the stage. The part of Camiola is the only one that I ever selected for myself. The Maid of Honor succeeded on its first representation, but failed to attract audiences. Though less defective than most of the contemporaneous dramatic compositions, the play was still too deficient in interest to retain the favor of the public. The character of Camiola is extremely noble and striking, but that of her lover so unworthy of her that the interest she excites personally fails to inspire one with sympathy for her passion for him. The piece in this respect has a sort of moral incoherency, which appears to me, indeed, not an infrequent defect in the compositions of these great dramatic pre-Shakespearites. There is a want of psychical verisimilitude, a disjointed abruptness, in their conceptions, which, in spite of their grand treatment of separate characters and the striking force of particular passages, renders almost every one of their plays inharmonious as a whole, however fine and powerful in detached parts. Their selection of abnormal and detestable subjects is a distinct indication of intellectual weakness instead of vigor; supreme genius alone perceives the beauty and dignity of human nature and human life in their common conditions, and can bring to the surface of vulgar, every-day existence the hidden glory that lies beneath it.

The strictures contained in these girlish letters on the various plays in which I was called to perform the heroines, of course partake of the uncompromising nature of all youthful verdicts. Hard, sharp, and shallow, they never went lower than the obvious surface of things, and dealt easily, after the undoubting youthful fashion, with a main result, without any misgiving as to conflicting causes or painful anxiety about contradictory component parts. At the beginning of life, the ignorant moral and intellectual standard alike have definite form and decided color; time, as it goes on, dissolves the outline into vague indistinctness, and reveals lights and shades so various and innumerable, that towards the end of life criticism grows diffident, opinion difficult, and positive judgment almost impossible.

My first London season was now drawing to an end, and preparations were begun for a summer tour in the provinces. There had been some talk of my beginning with Brighton, but for some reason or other this fell through. I do not suppose the fact of my father’s hearing that Captain C—— had made interest with the manager to be allowed to act with me had anything to do with his decision not to go there, as of course no such arrangement could have been fulfilled without our agreement to it, which was impossible; so I am afraid the gentleman amateur was disappointed and annoyed. Captain C——, of my acquaintance with whom I have spoken elsewhere, was passionately fond of the theatre, and one of the best amateur actors I have ever seen. He was at one time attached to the English embassy in Florence, while Lord N—— was our ambassador there, and the diplomatic duties of these gentlemen, in those good, easy, unpolitical times, were quite secondary in importance with them, I imagine, to the theatrical representations which were the principal occupation and interest of the British representative and his staff. Of one of these amateur performances I remember Captain C—— giving me a most ludicrous account. He was acting Macduff, to the Macbeth of Lord N—— (the diplomatists were heroic in their games), and during their final deadly encounter in the last scene, his excellency kept calling to him in a frenzied half-whisper, “ Fight round! fight round, will you! that they [the audience] may see my face! ” That was very like the real thing for an amateur. I used to think that my friend C—— had occasionally the tone of a disappointed man, who attributed his want of success to want of zeal on the part of his friends or active disservice on that of his enemies; I wonder if he ever attributed his not achieving an ambassadorship to the grudge of Lord N—— and his underhand influence, in consequence of his not having “fought round” and allowed him to “ show his face” properly to his Florentine spectators.

BATH, May 31, 1830.

MY DEAR H——: I have owed you an answer, and a most grateful one, for some time past, for your kindness in writing me so long a letter as your last; but when I assure you that, what with leavetaking, trying on dresses, making purchases, etc., etc., and all the preparations for our summer tour, this is the first moment in which I have been able to draw a long breath for the last month, I am sure you will forgive me, and believe, notwithstanding my long silence, that I was made very happy indeed by your letter. Do you know, when first I opened it I was so surprised and pleased at seeing another sheet within the first, that after my first movement of delight a second thought crossed my mind, that it must be an extract or a copy from something; not that I thought you incapable of inditing so much original matter, but it was so long since I had received such a full-grown epistle from you that I imagined it was “too good to be true.” All this tumbled into my head while I opened your letter, and may serve as some confirmation of what I often tell you, that I value them extremely. I bade Covent Garden and my dear London audience farewell on Friday last, when I acted Lady Townley for the first time. The house was crammed, and as the proprietors had fixed that night for a second benefit which they gave me, I was very glad that it was so. I was very nicely dressed, and to my own fancy acted well, though I dare say my performance was a little flat occasionally. But considering my own physical powers, and the immense size of the theatre, I do not think I should have done better on the whole by acting more broadly; though I suppose it would have been more effective, I should have had to sacrifice something of repose and refinement to make it so. I was very sorry to leave my London audience; they welcomed my first appearance, they knew the history of our shipwrecked fortunes, and though perhaps not one individual amongst them would go a mile out of his way to serve us, there exists in them, taken collectively, a kind feeling and respect for my father, and an indulgent good-will towards me, which I do not hope to find elsewhere. I like Bath very much; I have not been here since I was six years old, when I spent a year here in hopes of being bettered by my aunt, Mrs. Twiss. A most forlorn hope it was. I suppose in human annals there never existed a more troublesome little brat than I was for the few years after my first appearance on this earthly stage. This town reminds me a little of Edinburgh; it has the same broad, fine streets and stone houses, and occasional glimpses through them of charming country, but it has not the mountains nor the glorious sea. How glad I shall be to see Edinburgh once more! I expect much pleasure, too, from the pleasure of my aunt Dall, who some years ago spent some very happy time in Edinburgh, and who loves it from association. And then, dear H——, I am looking forward to seeing you once more; I shall be with you somewhere in the beginning of June. I have had my first rehearsal here this morning, Romeo and Juliet; the theatre is much smaller than Covent Garden, which rather inconveniences me, as a novelty, but the audience will certainly benefit by it. My fellow - laborers amuse me a good deal; their versions of Shakespeare are very droll, I wonder what your Irish ones will be. I am fortunate in my Romeo, inasmuch as he is one of my cousins; he has the family voice and manner very strongly, and at any rate does not murder the text of Shakespeare. I have no more time to spare now, for I must get my tea and go to the theatre. I must tell you, though, of an instance of provincial prudery (delicacy, I suppose I ought to call it) which edified us not a little at

rehearsal this morning: the Mercutio, on seeing the nurse and Peter, called out, “A sail, a sail!” and terminated the speech in a significant whisper, which being literally inaudible, my mother, who was with me on the stage, very innocently asked, “ Oh, does the gentleman leave out the shirt and the smock? ” upon which we were informed that “ body linen ” was not so much as to be hinted at before a truly refined Bath audience. How particular we are growing— in word! I am much afraid my father will shock them with the speech of that scamp Mercutio in all its pristine purity and precision. Good-by dear H——. Ever your affectionate

F. A. K.

P. S. My mother desires to be particularly remembered to you. I want to revive Massinger’s Maid of Honor; I want to act Camiola.

The necessity for carrying with us into the provinces a sufficient number of various parts, and especially of plays in which my father and myself could fill the principal characters, and so be tolerably independent of incompetent coadjutors, was the reason of my coming out in the play of The Provoked Husband, before leaving London. The passage in this letter about Lady Townley sufficiently shows how bad my performance of it must have been, and how absolutely in the dark I was with regard to the real style in which the part should be played. The fine lady of my day, with the unruffled insipidity of her low spirits (high spirits never came near her) and the imperturbable composure of her smooth insolence, was as unlike the rantipole, racketing high - bred woman of fashion of Sir John Vanbrugh’s play as the flimsy elegance of my silver - embroidered, rose - colored tulle dress was unlike the elaborate splendor of her hooped and feathered and high-heeled, patched - and - powdered magnificence, with its falling laces and standing brocades. The part of Lady Townley was not only beyond my powers, but has never been seen on the English stage since the days of Mrs. Abigdon and Miss Farren, the latter elegant and spirited actress being held by those who had seen both less like the original great lady than her predecessor; while even the Théâtre Français, where consummate study and reverend tradition of elder art still prevail, has lost more and more the secret of la grande manière in a gradual descent from the grande dame of Mademoiselle Contat to the pretty, graceful femme comme il faut of Mademoiselle Plessis; for even the exquisite Célimène of Mademoiselle Mars was but a “ pale reflex ” of Molière’s brilliant coquette, as played by her great instructress, Contat. The truth is, that society no longer possesses or produces that creature, and a good deal of reading, not of a usual or agreeable kind, would alone make one familiar enough with Lady Townley and her like to enable an actress of the present day to represent her with any verisimilitude. The absurd practice, too, of dressing all the serious characters of the piece in modern costume, and all the comic ones in that of the time at which it was written, renders the whole ridiculously incoherent and manifestly impossible, and destroys it as a picture of the manners of any time; for even stripped of her hoop and powder, and her more flagrant coarsenesses of speech, Lady Townley is still as unlike, in manners, language, and deportment, any modern lady, as she is unlike the woman of fashion of Hogarth’s time, whose costume she has discarded.

The event fully justified my expectation of far less friendly audiences out of London than those I had hitherto made my appeals to. None of the personal interest that was felt for me there existed elsewhere, and I had to encounter the usual opposition, always prepared to cavil, in the provinces, at the metropolitan verdict of merit, as a mere exhibition of independent judgment, and to make good to the expectations of the country critics the highly laudatory reports of the London press, by which the provincial judges scorned to have a decision imposed upon them. Not unnaturally, therefore, I found a much less fervid enthusiasm in my audiences — who were, I dare say, quite justified in their disappointment — and a far less eulogistic tone in the provincial press with regard to my performances. Our houses, however, were always very crowded, which was the essential point, and for my own part I was quite satisfied with the notices and applause which were bestowed on me. My cousin, John Mason, was the Romeo to whom I have referred in this letter. He was my father’s sister’s son, and, like so many members of our family, he and one of his brothers and his sister had made the stage their profession. He had some favorable physical qualifications for it a rather striking face, handsome figure, good voice, and plenty of fire and energy; he was tolerably clever and well-informed, but without either imagination or refinement. My father, who thought there was the making of a good actor in him, was extremely kind to him, and for several years he was on terms of friendly familiarity with us, and we saw him constantly both on and off the stage.

GLASGOW, Monday, June 28. 1830.

MY DEAR MRS. JAMESON, — I believe that you will have felt too well convinced that I had not had a moment to spare, to be surprised at my not having sooner acknowledged your very kind letter; nothing but the incessant occupation of my time would so long have prevented me from doing so, but I embrace the opportunity which the king’s death affords me of telling you how much obliged to you I was for writing to me, and writing as you did. I have little news to return you but what concerns myself, but I shall make no coquettish excuses about that, for I really believe ’t is the subject that will interest you most of any I could find. First, then, I am very well, rather tired, and sitting at an inn window, in a dull, dark, handsome square in Glasgow. My fortnight in Edinburgh is over, and a short fortnight it has been, what with rehearsals, riding, sitting for my bust, and acting. The few hurried glimpses I have caught of my friends have been like dreams, and now that I have parted from them, no more to meet them there certainly, the whole seems to me like mere bewilderment, and I repeat to myself in my thoughts, hardly believing it, that the next time that I visit Edinburgh I shall not find the dear companionship of my cousins nor the fond affection of Mrs. Henry Siddons. This will be a severe loss to me; Edinburgh will, I fear, be without its greatest charm, and it will remain to be proved whether these lovely scenes that I have so admired and delighted in owed all their incomparable fascination to their intrinsic beauty, or to that most pleasurable frame of mind I enjoyed at the same time, the consciousness of the kind regard of the excellent human beings among whom I lived.

You will naturally expect me to say something of my theatrical experiences in the modern Athens. Our houses have been very fine, our audiences (as is their national nature) very cold; but upon the whole I believe they were well pleased with us, notwithstanding the damping influence of the newspapers, which have one and all been unfavorable to me. The death-like stillness of the audience, as it afforded me neither rest nor stimulus, distressed me a good deal; which, I think I need not tell you, the newspaper criticisms did not. I was surprised, in reading them, to find how very generally their strictures were confined to my external disadvantages, — my diminutive stature and defective features; and that these far-famed northern critics discussed these rather than what I should have expected them to bestow their consideration upon, the dramatic artist’s conception of character, and his (or her) execution of that conception. But had their verdicts been still more severe, I have a sufficient consolation in two notes of Sir Walter Scott’s, written to the editor of one of the papers, Ballantyne, his own particular friend, which the latter sent me, and where he bears such testimony to my exertions as I do not care to transcribe, for fear my cheeks should reflect a lasting blush on my paper, but which I keep as a treasure and shall certainly show you with pride and pleasure when we meet.

Among the delightful occurrences of last week, I must record our breakfasting with Walter Scott. I was wonderfully happy. To whom, since Shakespeare, does the reading world owe so many hours of perfect, peaceful pleasure, of blessed forgetfulness of all things miserable and mean in its daily life? The party was a small but interesting one: Sir Walter and his daughter Anne, his old friend Sir Adam Fergusson and Lady Fergusson, and Miss Ferrier, the authoress of Marriage, and Inheritance, with both which capital books I hope, for your own sake, you are acquainted. Sir Walter was most delightful, and I even forgot all awful sense of his celebrity in his kind, cordial, and almost affectionate manner towards me. He is exceedingly like all the engravings, pictures, and busts of him with which one is familiar, and it seems strange that so varied and noble an intellect should be expressed in the features of a shrewd, kindly, but not otherwise striking countenance. He told me several things that interested me very much; among others, his being present at the time when, after much searching, the regalia of Scotland was found locked up in a room in Edinburgh Castle, where, as he said, the dust of centuries had accumulated upon it, and where the ashes of fires lit more than two hundred years before were still lying in the grate. He told me a story that made me cry, of a poor old lady upwards of eighty years of age, who belonged to one of the great Jacobite families, — she was a Maxwell, — sending to him at the time the Scottish crown was found, to implore permission to see it but for one instant; which (although in every other case the same petition had been refused) was granted to her in consideration of her great age and the vital importance she seemed to attach to it. I never shall forget his describing her when first she saw it, appearing for a moment petrified at sight of it, and then tottering forward and falling down on her knees, and weeping and wailing over these poor remains of the royalty of her country as if it had been the dead body of her child.

Sir Adam Fergusson is a delightful person, whose quick, bustling manner forms a striking contrast to Walter Scott’s quiet tone of voice and deliberate enunciation. I have also made acquaintance with Jeffrey, who came and called upon us the other morning, and, I hear, like other of his fellow-townsmen, complains piteously that I am not prettier. Indeed, I am very sorry for it, and I heartily wish I were; but I did not think him handsome either, and I wonder why he is not handsomer? though I don’t care so much about his want of beauty as he seems to do about mine. But I am running on at a tremendous rate, and quite forget that I have traveled upwards of forty miles to-day, and that I promised my mother, whenever I could, to go to bed early. Good-by, my dear Mrs. Jameson. I hope you will be able to make out this scrawl, and to decipher that I am yours affectionately,

F. A. KEMBLE.

Of the proverbial frigidity of the Edinburgh public I had been forewarned, and of its probably disheartening effect upon myself. Mrs. Harry Siddons had often told me of the intolerable sense of depression with which it affected Mrs. Siddons, who, she said, after some of her grandest outbursts of passion, to which not a single expression of applause or sympathy had responded, exhausted and breathless with the effort she had made, would pant out in despair, under her breath, “ Stupid people, stupid people! ” Stupid, however, they undoubtedly were not, though, as undoubtedly, their want of excitability and demonstrativeness diminished their own pleasure by communicating itself to the great actress and partially paralyzing her powers. The story was often told me by my Edinburgh friends, when I complained of their distressing coldness as an audience, how one night, after one of Mrs. Siddons’s greatest exhibitions of power and pathos, the dead silence of the house was broken, after a pause of about a minute, by a single voice oracularly pronouncing, “That’s no bad!” which, like the string of a shower-bath, pulled down at once a perfect tempest of applause from the apparently insensible public. That this habitual reserve sometimes gave way to very violent exhibitions of enthusiasm, the more fervent from its general repression, there is no doubt; and I think it was in Edinburgh that my friend, Mr. Harness, told me the whole of the sleep-walking scene in Macbeth had once been so vehemently encored that my aunt was literally obliged to go over it a second time, before the piece was allowed to proceed.

Scott’s opinion of my acting, which would, of course, have been very valuable to me, let it have been what it would, was written to his friend and editor (eheu !), Ballantyne, who was also the editor of one of the principal Edinburgh papers, in which unfavorable criticisms of my performances had appeared, and in opposition to which Sir Walter Scott told him he was too hard upon me, and that for his part he had seen nothing so good since Mrs. Siddons. This encouraging verdict was courteously forwarded to me by Mr. Ballantyne himself, who said he was sure I would like to possess it. The first time I ever saw Walter Scott, my father and myself were riding slowly down Princes Street, up which Scott was walking; he stopped my father’s horse, which was near the pavement, and desired to be introduced to me. Then followed a string of cordial invitations which previous engagements and our work at the theatre forbade our accepting, all but the pressing one with which he wound up, that we would at least come and breakfast with him. The first words he addressed to me as I entered the room were, “ You appear to be a very good horsewoman, which is a great merit in the eyes of an old border-man.” Every r in which sentence was rolled into a combination of double u and double r by his border burr, which made it memorable to me by this peculiarity of his pleasant speech. My previous acquaintance with Miss Ferrier’s admirable novels would have made me very glad of the opportunity of meeting her, and I should have thought Sir Adam Fergusson delightfully entertaining, but that I could not bear to lose, while listening to any one else, a single word spoken by Walter Scott.

I never can forget, however, the description Sir Adam Fergusson gave me of a morning he had passed with Scott at Abbotsford, which at that time was still unfinished, and, swarming with carpenters, painters, masons, and bricklayers, was surrounded with all the dirt and disorderly discomfort inseparable from the process of house-building. The room they sat in was in the roughest condition which admitted of their occupying it at all; the raw, new chimney smoked intolerably. Out-of-doors the whole place was still one chaos of bricks, mortar, scaffolding, tiles, and slates. A heavy mist shrouded the whole landscape of lovely Tweed side, and distilled in a cold, persistent, dumb drizzle. Maida, the well-beloved staghound, kept fidgeting in and out of the room, Walter Scott every five minutes exclaiming, “Eh, Adam! the puir brute’s just wearying to get out; ” or, “ Eh, Adam! the puir creature ’s just crying to come in; ’’ when Sir Adam would open the door to the raw, chilly air for the wet, muddy hound’s exit or entrance, while Scott, with his face swollen with a grievous toothache, and one hand pressed hard to his cheek, with the other was writing the inimitably humorous opening chapters of The Antiquary, which he passed across the table, sheet by sheet, to his friend, saying, “ Now, Adam, d ’ye think that ’ll do? ” Such a picture of mental triumph over outward circumstance has surely seldom been surpassed; house-builders, smoky chimney, damp draughts, restless, dripping dog, and toothache, form what our friend, Miss Masson, called a “ concatenation of exteriorities ’’ little favorable to literary composition of any sort; but considered as accompaniments or inspiration of that delightfully comical beginning of The Antiquary, they are all but incredible.

To my theatrical avocation I have been indebted for many social pleasures and privileges; among others, for Sir Walter Scott’s notice and acquaintance; but among the things it has deprived

me of was the opportunity of enjoying more of his honorable and delightful intercourse. A visit to Abbotsford, urged upon us most kindly, is one of the lost opportunities of my life that I think of always with bitter regret. Sir Walter wanted us to go down and spend a week with him in the country, and our professional engagements rendered it impossible for us to do so; and there are few things in my whole life that I count greater loss than the seven days I might have passed with that admirable genius and excellent, kind man, and had to forego. I never saw Abbotsford until after its master had departed from all earthly dwelling-places. I was staying in the neighborhood, at the house of my friend, Mrs. M——, of Carolside, and went thither with her and my youngest daughter. The house was inhabited only by servants; and the housekeeper, whose charge it was to show it, waited till a sufficient number of tourists and sight-seers had collected, and then drove us all together from room to room of the house in a body, calling back those who outstripped her, and the laggers who would fain have fallen a few paces out of the sound of the dreary parrotry of her inventory of the contents of each apartment. There was his writing-table and chair, his dreadnaught suit and thick walking shoes and staff there in the drawing-room; the table, fitted like a jeweler’s counter, with a glass cover, protecting and exhibiting all the royal and precious tokens of honor and admiration, in the shape of orders, boxes, miniatures, etc., bestowed on him by the most exalted worshipers of his genius, hardly to be distinguished under the thick coat of dust with which the glass was darkened. Poor Anne Scott’s portrait looked dolefully down on the strangers staring up at her, and, a glass door being open to the garden, Mrs. M—— and myself stepped out for a moment to recover from the miserable impression of sadness and desecration the whole thing produced on us; but the inexorable voice of the housekeeper peremptorily ordered us to return, as it would be she said (and very truly), quite impossible for her to do her duty in describing the “curiosities” of the house, if visitors took upon themselves to stray about in every direction instead of keeping together and listening to what she was saying. How glad we were to escape from the sort of nightmare of the affair!

I returned there on another occasion, one of a large and merry party who had obtained permission to picnic in the grounds, but who, deterred by the threatening aspect of the skies from gypsying (as had originally been proposed) by the side of the Tweed, were allowed, by Sir Adam Fergusson’s interest with the housekeeper, to assemble round the table in the dining-room of Abbotsford. Here, again, the past was so present with me as to destroy all enjoyment, and, thinking how I might have had the great good fortune to sit there with the man who had made the whole place illustrious, I felt ashamed and grieved at being there then, though my companions were all kind, merry, good-hearted people, bent upon their own and each other’s enjoyment. Sir Adam Fergusson had grown very old, and told no more the vivid anecdotes of former days; and to complete my mental discomfort, on the wall immediately opposite to me hung a strange picture of Mary Stuart’s head, severed from the trunk and lying on a white cloth on a table, as one sees the head of John the Baptist in the charger, in pictures of Herodias’s daughter. It was a ghastly presentation of the guillotined head of a pretty but rather common - looking French woman, — a fancy picture which it certainly would not have been my fancy to have presiding over my dinnertable.

Only once after this dreary party of pleasure did I return, many years later, to Abbotsford. I was alone, and the tourist season was over, and, the sad autumnal afternoon offering little prospect of my being joined by other sightseers, I prevailed with the housekeeper, who admitted me, to let me wander about the place, without entering the house; and I spent a most melancholy hour in the garden and in pacing up and

down the terrace overlooking the Tweed side. The place was no longer inhabited at all; my ringing at the gate had brought, after much delay, a servant from Mr. Hope’s new residence, built at some distance from Scott’s house, and from her I learned that the proprietor of Abbotsford had withdrawn to the house he had erected for himself, leaving the poet’s dwelling exclusively as a place of pilgrimage for travelers and strangers, with not even a servant residing under its roof. The house abandoned to curious wayfarers; the sons and daughters, the grandson and granddaughter, every member of the founder’s family dead; Mr. Hope remarried to a lady of the house of Arundel, and living in a semi-monastic seclusion in a house walled off from the tourist-haunted shrine of the great man whose memory alone was left to inhabit it, — all these circumstances filled me with indescribable sadness as I paced up and down in the gloaming, and thought of the strange passion for founding here a family of the old border type which had obfuscated the keen, clear brain of Walter Scott, made his wonderful gifts subservient to the most futile object of ambition, driven him to the verge of disgrace and bankruptcy, embittered the evening of his laborious and glorious career, and finally ended in this,—the utter extinction of the name he had illustrated and the family he had hoped to found. And while his noble works remain to make his memory ever loved and honored, this Brummagem mediæval mansion, this mock feudal castle with its imitation baronial hall (upon a diminutive scale) hung round with suits of armor, testifies to the utter perversion of good sense and good taste resulting from this one mental infirmity, this craving to be a border chieftain of the sixteenth century instead of an Edinburgh lawyer of the nineteenth, and his preference for the distinction of a petty land-holder to that of the foremost genius of his age. Mr. Combe, in speaking of this feudal insanity of Scott and the piteous havoc it made of his life, told me that at one time he and Ballantyne, with whom he had entered into partnership, were staving off imminent ruin by indorsing and accepting each other’s bills, and carried on that process to the extremest verge compatible with honesty. What a history of astounding success and utter failure!

GLASGOW, July 3, 1830.

You will, ere this, my dear Mrs. Jameson, have received my very tardy reply to your first kind letter. I got your second last night at the theatre, just after I had given away my jewels to Mr. Beverley. I was much gratified by your profession of affection for me, for though I am not over-desirous of public admiration and approbation, I am anxious to secure the good-will of individuals whose intellect I admire, and on whose character I can with confidence rely. Your letter, however, made me uncomfortable in some respects; you seem unhappy and perplexed. I am sure you will believe me when I say that, without the remotest thought of intruding on the sacredness of private annoyances and distresses, I most sincerely sympathize in your uneasiness, whatever may be its cause, and earnestly pray that the cloud, which the two or three last times we met in London hung so heavily on your spirits, may pass away. It is not for me to say to you, “Patience,” my dear Mrs. Jameson; you have suffered too much to have neglected that only remedy of our afflictions, but I trust Heaven will make it an efficacious one to you, and erelong send you less need of it. I am glad you see my mother often, and very glad that to assist your recollection of me you find interest and amusement in discussing the fitting-up of my room with her. Pray do not forget that the drawing you made of the rooms in James Street is mine, and that when you visit me in my new abode it will be pleasant to have that remembrance before us of a place where we have spent some hours very happily together.

What you say of Mrs. N—— only echoes my own thoughts of her. She is a splendid creature, nobly endowed every way; too nobly to become through mere frivolity and foolish vanity the mark of the malice and envy of such things as she is surrounded by, and who will all eagerly embrace the opportunity of slandering one so immeasurably their superior in every respect. I do not know much of her, but I feel deeply interested in her; not precisely with the interest inspired by loving or even liking, but with that feeling of admiring solicitude with which one must regard a person so gifted, so tempted, and in such a position as hers. I am glad that lovely sister of hers is married, though matrimony in that world is not always the securest haven for a woman’s virtue or happiness; it is sometimes in that society the reverse of an “honorable estate.”

The poor king’s death gave me a holiday on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, and we eagerly embraced the opportunity its respite afforded us of visiting Loch Lomond and the entrance to Loch Long. As almost my first thought when we reached the lake was, “How can people attempt to describe such places?” I shall not terminate my letter with “ smooth expanses of sapphiretinted waves,” or “purple screens of heath-clad hills rising one above another into the cloudless sky.” A volume might be written on the mere color of the water, and give no idea of it, though you are the very person whose imagination, aided by all that you ’ve seen, would best realize such a scene from description. It was heavenly, and we had such a perfect day! I prefer, however, the glimpse we had of Loch Long to what we saw of Loch Lomond. The latter has more serene beauty in its wide expanse and verdant shores, but the rocks and crags which guard the entrance of Loch Long are wilder and more sublime, and the dark water inclosed by the mountains of Arquhar, instead of reflecting the smiling sky as it lay mirrored on the wide surface of Loch Lomond, borrowed a sinister, gloomy tint from the black cliffs that wall it in on either side. Perhaps, too, the circumstance of our not having had time to explore Loch Long added the stimulus of unsatisfied curiosity to the admiration which was excited by what I saw of it, and fancy still suggests that what was “ beyond ” would have been more beautiful than all I had seen. I brought away an appropriate nosegay from my trip: a white rose from Dumbarton, in memory of Mary Stuart, an oak branch from Loch Lomond, and a handful of heather, for which I fought with the bees on the rocky shore of Loch Long.

I like my Glasgow audience better than my Edinburgh one; they are not so cold. I look for a pleasant audience in your country, for which we set out tomorrow, I believe. My aunt desires to be remembered to you, and so does my father, and bids me add, in answer to your modest doubt, that you are a person to be always remembered with pleasure and esteem. I am glad you did not like my Bath miniature; indeed, it was not likely that you would.

Believe me always yours affectionately, F. A. K.

During our summer tour my mother, who had remained in London, superintended the preparation of a new house, to which we removed on our return to town. My brother Henry’s schooling at Westminster was over, which had been the reason for our taking the house at Buckingham Gate, and, though it had proved a satisfactory residence in many respects, we were glad to exchange it for the one to which we now went, which had many associations that made it agreeable to my father, having been my uncle John’s home for many years, and connected with him in the memory of my parents. It was the corner house of Great Russell Street and Montague Place, and, since we left it, has been included in the new court-yard of the British Museum (which was next door to it) and become the librarian’s quarters, our friend Panizzi being its first occupant afterward. It was a good, comfortable, substantial house, the two pleasantest rooms of which, to me, were the small apartment on the ground floor,

lined with books from floor to ceiling, and my own peculiar lodging in the upper regions, which, thanks to my mother’s kindness and taste, was as pretty a bower of elegant comfort as any young spinster need have desired. There I chiefly spent my time, pursuing my favorite occupations, or in the society of my own especial friends: my dear H—— S——, when she was in London; Mrs. Jameson, who often climbed thither for an hour’s pleasant discussion of her book on Shakespeare; and a lady with whom I now formed a very close intimacy, which lasted till her death, my dear E——F——.

I had the misfortune to lose the watercolor sketches which Mrs. Jameson had made of our two drawing-rooms in James Street, Buckingham Gate. They were very pretty and skillful specimens of a difficult kind of subject, and valuable as her work, no less than as tokens of her regard for me. The beautiful G—— S——, to whose marriage I have referred, had she not been a sister of her sisters would have been considered a wit; and, in spite of this was the greatest beauty of her day. She always reminded me of what an American once said in speaking of a countrywoman of his, that she was so lovely that when she came into the room she took his breath away. While I was in Bath I was asked by a young artist to sit for my miniature. His portrait had considerable merit as a piece of delicate, highly finished workmanship; it was taken in the part of Portia, and engraved; but I think no one, without the label underneath, would have imagined in it even the intention of my portrait. Whether or not the cause lay in my own dissimilar expressions and dissimilar aspects at different times, I do not know; but if a collection was made of the likenesses that have been taken of me, to the number of nearly thirty, nobody would ever imagine that they were intended to represent the same person. Certainly, my Bath miniature produced a version of my face perfectly unfamiliar to myself and most of my friends who saw it.

Frances Anne Kemble.