December 24.—We returned to Ireland the middle of
October, after our most delightful, gratifying, and interesting visit to the
Continent, but I had not the heart to resume the thread of my chronicles till
this day, and now only because the year is winding up, and I am going away for
a time. During my charming June and July in London, I kept a very rough outline
of what I was about, and whom I saw (and
| DRAMATIC SCENES AND SKETCHES—1833. | 377 |
Contrary to our intentions, we accepted an invitation
from Sir Thomas and Lady Chapman, for the sake of my dear girls,
who were included. A most joyous and agreeable fortnight. Think of their being
afraid of asking me to their
superb castle, lest I should be ennuyée with their
society, and doing the honours by me as if I were a little queen! Talking with
Lady Chapman the other day, on the radical liberalism
of her three sons and two nephews (the Tighes), I said,
laughingly, “With a Tory father, a Tory uncle, an aristocratic mother,
how comes it that all your young men, bred up in absolution, should be such
liberals! who converted them?” She smiled, and said, “Why, then,
to tell the truth, it was your Ladyship.” “I? Why, I have
talked so little to them since they grew up.” “You have talked
enough, and written more than enough to make them what they are!”
It is
| 378 | LADY MORGAN'S MEMOIR. |
We returned to town on Saturday, 21st, and dined with Mr. Wallace, my old lover, M.P. for Carlow. I sat at dinner between the Provost and the Secretary of State, Mr. Littleton. I attacked the Provost’s college wall on one side (as we are struggling to have it down to open narrow Nassau Street), and other walls on the other side. I took the opportunity of bringing forward the honest and the clever, who never make their way; I always do this when I get beside the great and influential. I spoke of Dr. Macarthy, the honest and philosophical, and I put a spoke in the wheel of the College of Surgeons, the jobbing, exclusive, monopolising College of Surgeons. When we got upon O’Connell, I said, “Listen to a foolish woman’s prophecy. O’Connell is veering towards you, because, just now he is losing hold on the people, and the rent for the time has failed. If you meet him a step he will entangle you, perhaps betray you; at all events, he will make a merit of it in the eyes of his dupes.”
Mr. Littleton. “But do you not think he will be worth having?”
“Yes; if you can catch him and keep him, but he has an Irish physical talent
none of you can cope with, subtlety. The eel is a lump
of lead compared with O’Connell,
he has no one fixed principle; the end, with him, consecrates the means, and
that end
is—O’Connell, the beginning and end of all
things.” Mr. Littleton was silent,
and then asked me if I were pleased with the batch of commissionerships he had
given away.
| DRAMATIC SCENES AND SKETCHES—1833. | 379 |
Christmas Eve.—Eating, drinking, flirting, and reading. I must register an odd thought. The Irish destiny is between Bedlam and a jail; but I won’t pursue it. So ends my journal of 1833. How much I have felt, suffered, enjoyed, seen, and heard in that year!!
