May 20th.—Off to-day for Shangana and my dear General Cockburn. I am breaking down again under close air and want of exercise. Morgan, I declare, loves me very well, but not well enough to break through his usual habits of indolence, so he don’t walk, and hates driving,—so I have no resource.
May 30th.—Returned home the 27th—Shangana is a divine spot! how I enjoyed its scenes! I used to reproach the General for leaving it in these very words—
|
“Oh, how canst thou renounce the boundless store
Of charms which nature to her votary yields,
The warbling woodland, the meandering shore,
The pomp of groves, the garniture of woods;
All that the genial ray of morning gilds,
And all that colours to the song of even,
All that the mountain’s sheltering bosom yields,
And all the dread magnificence of heaven;
Oh, how canst thou renounce and be forgiven?”
|
Gray says, “this of all others
is my favourite stanza; it is true feeling, it is inspiration!”
How can I “hope
| 296 | LADY MORGAN'S MEMOIR. |
Quoth I, “Lord Anglesey! some admire you as lord-lieutenant, some for your heroism, but I admire you for—
Lord A. “What, Lady Morgan? pray shock us!”
Lady M. “For the cut of your coat; who is your tailor? or is all this your own order?”
Lord A. (laughing) “Oh, I never give an order, I have an old model coat, the great great grandfather of this; I always say ‘make it like this coat,’ that is all my order.”
Lady M. “The fact is, you dress better than any one, et je m’y connais bien!”
Lord A. “Well! I did dress well when I was
young, so well, that my early and kindest friend, the late king, did me the honour to enter the
lists with me; I remember his saying, at a ball at Devonshire House,
‘There is that d——d Paget, better
dressed than ever.’ He went further than this. One day I went to
Carlton House, by appointment; we were to go together, the prince and I, to
some morning fête, I forget where. I had waited some time in the
drawing-room, when a groom of the chambers put in his head, looked
earnestly at me, and retired. Presently the
| THE SECOND WORK ON FRANCE—1830. | 297 |
Lady M. “I don’t think he would have taken your excellency now as a model in anything.”
Lord A. “No, he hated me, at least, he could never forgive me my conduct in Ireland. I grieved at this, for up to my first Irish vice-royalty, he was the kindest of the kind, and I loved him much.”
Lady M. “Well, but to go back to the toilette, don’t you think one gets more soigné as one gets older?”
Lord A. “I really think one does; in fact, one owes it to society to make amends for the defects of time; we ought to shock the younger world as little as possible.”
Morgan joined us, and we got into politics.
Lord A—— said, “Much has been done in the way of reform, but the Tories must swallow more yet, the Church establishment must retrench. If those gentlemen would save anything, they must give up much. If the king had lived a year longer, you would have had a revolution, nothing could have stopped it.”
June 17.—Off to Lyons.
June 27.—Returned from Lyons—Lord Cloncurry’s,
| 298 | LADY MORGAN'S MEMOIR. |
July 1st.—I had a few people last
evening,—my own family, Curran,
General Cockburn, and the ex-judge
Johnson;
Johnson is a fine specimen of the old wit, talent, and
literary condition of Ireland. He was the intimate friend of the celebrated
Curran, to whose son he is much
attached. Though eighty-five years of age his conversation is full of force,
humour, and gallantry, scarcely a trace of age. He told me in the morning
| THE SECOND WORK ON FRANCE—1830. | 299 |
Captain Arthur Wellesley (the Duke of Wellington’s nephew) dropped in. In the course of the evening Johnson told him an anecdote of his illustrious uncle that amused him.
“I dined,” he said, “about forty years ago with old Colonel Ross, of Gloucester Street, Dublin; Ross’s nephew, a college boy, (the late General Ross,) dined with us; in the middle of dinner, a little aide de camp, a playfellow of Ross’s, came in. They amused each other at dinner with running pins into each other, and made such a noise that the old Colonel, starting up, cried, “G—d d—n it, boys, if you cannot be quiet, go out into the yard and play ball, but don’t disturb the dinner.” The boys, were the Duke of Wellington and General Ross.
Judge Johnson was a judge who was
prosecuted for a seditious libel; it was an attack on Lord Hardwicke, when lord-lieutenant of Ireland (published in
Cobbett’s Register), at the moment when he had a
seat on the Bench. The jury found him guilty of the libel; but an opportune
change of ministry between the verdict and the sentence, allowed a nolle prosequi to be entered. He retired
from the Bench, on a pension, in 1806. He had a most unprofessional taste for
military affairs, and held some peculiar theories; amongst others, that pikes
and arrows were better weapons than muskets or bayonets; and he prided himself
on having invented a pike with a hollow staff, to contain arrows,
| 300 | LADY MORGAN'S MEMOIR. |
July 5th.—Left town on Friday for Morris Town, the seat of Jack Lattan, County Kildare; he carried us off vi et armis in his old French calèche, with his old French horses, and his French cook driving us. He comes yearly from his hotel in the chaussée d’Antin to his old seat in the Bog of Allan; what a transit! As we passed that vast ruin, the palace built by Lord Stafford, near Naas, (one of the items in his indictment), he pointed to a field under the window of the ruin. “There,” he said, “begins my estate, we held it under King John, and never lost or added an acre; we must have been very mediocre people.” Lord Stafford, in one of his letters, describing this palace as having been built with the hope of having the king’s majesty his guest, observes, “My close neighbour is one Lattan, an Irish Papist.” The Wentworth property is now Lord Fitzwilliam’s. The traditions of this country are all in Lord Stafford’s favour, he did no violent things here. Lattan said his memory fatigued him by its redundance. What myriads of anecdotes! Here is a funny one. The Duc de Laval said to him, one day, on the subject of England—“Ecoutez mon cher, je connais l’Angleterre au fond, les fils ainés sont tous riches et ivrognes, les cadets sont pauvres et volent sur le grand chemin!”
Lord Cloncurry in his Life and Times,
mentions Mr. Lattan having been in the
French service, 1793; he describes him as one of a race, now extinct; a
| THE SECOND WORK ON FRANCE—1830. | 301 |
September 5th.—Since I last scribbled in these pages, what events! I have lived in them, for them, and with them, even at this distance from the scene of action! My life, made up of sensations, will be found in the postscript of my new France, the publication of which was retarded for the purpose of inserting it. I shall not say a word of this great subject here.
September 8.—The arrival of Moore and his family has fait epoch. We had to meet him at dinner yesterday,—North, Sheil, Curran, and my own family; all his old cronies in the evening, and his old love, Mrs. Smith, to whom he addressed the song “If in the dream that hovers.” He sang as well as ever, but it made us all sad; all he sang had reference to the past. I felt when I went to bed as if I had been at the funeral of old friends.
| 302 | LADY MORGAN'S MEMOIR. |
Moore refers to this dinner in his diary, September 7, 1830. “Desperate wet day; dined at Lady Morgan’s—company, Edward Moore, North, Curran, Sheil, the Clarkes.”
Great delay about the appearance of my book, it takes six days to receive and return each proof sheet. It ought to come out to-morrow.
