To those who have lived all the days of their life in society, who know the elements of which it is composed—its proneness to that peculiar feature of morbid civilization called Ridicule, of which no savages except the New Zealanders have any notion,—it is no faint effort of moral courage to exhibit themselves even in Kit-cat, and with all appliances and means to boot, de se peindre en pied!
The author of the following pages has, however, lived so continually before the scene, even from her earliest childhood upwards; she has been so often drawn from the life—caricatured to the uttermost—abused, calumniated, misrepresented, flattered, eulogized, persecuted; supported as party dictated or prejudice permitted; the pet of the Liberals of one nation, the bête-noire of the ultra set of another; the poor butt that reviewers, editors and critics have set up,—that she may, perhaps, be pardoned for wishing to speak a few true and final words of herself.
| 2 | LADY MORGAN'S MEMOIR. |
The success of my first Irish national novel, The Wild Irish Girl, my attempts to advocate liberal opinions in my works on France and Italy, when I stood forth in the cause of civil and religious liberty, dipped many a pen in gall against me which would otherwise have more gently scanned my faults. However, here I am once more, and to you, dear, kind, fair-judging public, who are always for giving a fair field and no favour, and who are always willing to take the odds for those who “show pluck” and who “hit out,” to you I dedicate these pages, in which I have entered the circumstances of my life, sans peur et sans tache. Memoires pour servir generally mean either “serving out” one’s friends and enemies, or feeding a morbid appetite for secret slander. I can promise no scandal, neither can I open a biographical ledger, after the fashion of Miss Betsy Thoughtless and others, with an “I was born, &c., &c.,” or “the villain who deceived me was quartered in the town where my father lived;” nor yet can I pretend to give a description of the “scene of rural innocence where first I saw the light.”
The sum of my long experience in society leaves in its total a large
balance in favour of what is good. I have no reason to complain of memory; I find in my
efforts to track its records, guided by the fond feelings of my life, and warmed by the
fancifulness of my Celtic temperament, bright hues come forward like the colours of the
tesselated pavement of antiquity when the renovating water is flung upon them. I pause here
for a moment to mention as a curious physiological fact, that this memory is much preserved
| PREFATORY ADDRESS | 3 |
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