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Lady Morgan’s Memoirs
Chapter XXXV
INTRODUCTION & INDEXES
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Preface
Vol. I Contents.
Prefatory Address
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Chapter XX
Chapter XXI
Chapter XXII
Chapter XXIII
Chapter XXIV
Chapter XXV
Chapter XXVI
Chapter XXVII
Chapter XXVIII
Chapter XXIX
Chapter XXX
Chapter XXXI
Chapter XXXII
Chapter XXXIII
Chapter XXXIV
Chapter XXXV
Chapter XXXVI
Chapter XXXVII
Chapter XXXVIII
Vol. I Index
Vol. II Contents
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter IV
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Chapter XX
Chapter XXI
Chapter XXII
Chapter XXIII
Chapter XXIV
Chapter XXV
Chapter XXVI
Chapter XXVII
Chapter XXVIII
Chapter XXIX
Chapter XXX
Chapter XXXI
Chapter XXXII
Chapter XXXIII
Chapter XXXIV
‣ Chapter XXXV
Chapter XXXVI
Chapter XXXVII
Chapter XXXVIII
Chapter XXXIX
Chapter XL
Vol. II Index
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CHAPTER XXXV.
LADY MORGAN AND CARDINAL WISEMAN.

In the early part of 1850 there was rather a lively discussion about abolishing the office of Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. It excited more vehemence and party spirit than the question was intrinsically worth. English people were inclined to think, that one real queen was enough for the United Kingdom and the colonies besides; but the Irish clung tenaciously to having a viceroy of their own to preside over the festivities of the Castle, and to give a “court circle” to their capital, and they saw in the reported measure, only one insult more from England. Lady Morgan was appealed to by persons on both sides of the question for her opinion. Her political judgment was considered good; and her experience of the old vice-regal times had given her a knowledge which made her opinion worth listening to. She wrote one or two “letters” on the subject, which are not to be found now. The question fell into speedy abeyance; and the Lord Lieutenant is still “to the fore.” Lady
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Morgan’s opinion was to abolish the office. This note from Mr. Hallam refers to one of her articles.

Mr. Hallam to Lady Morgan.
April 14, Friday Morning.
Dear Lady Morgan,

Yours is a sharp pen, and I hope it will never be directed against me, of which, indeed, I have no fears whatever. What you say of old viceroys is, I fear, true enough. Yet, in those times it was impossible to dispense with them—the necessity ought now to be at an end; though I am not master enough of the state of Ireland to pronounce absolutely against their continuance. But you can make any case a good one with wit or raillery.

Truly yours,
H. Hallam.

The following pleasant note from Douglas Jerrold refers to a coup de patte in Punch, where Lady Morgan took her share of life’s game of give and take. Jerrold’s note would be a compensation for a much more disagreeable dispensation. The only thing Lady Morgan could not forgive, was neglect!

Putney,
June 9.
Dear Lady Morgan,

I was very sorry that I had promised my friend—and all the world’s friend—Mr. Paxton, to dine with
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him at a dinner where he presides to-day; and so I further miss the opportunity of personally avowing to you my opinion of that smallest of the small, and dullest of the dull onslaughts upon your party. I had not read it until I received yours; and I think Punch does not often make such a blunder, for which he owes you penitential reparation; but when he does blunder, he does it with a courageous stupidity. The editor is one of the best hearted of men, and will, I know, be annoyed when brought face to face with the absurdity.

Believe me, dear Lady Morgan,
Your old and early reader,
And therefore most truly yours,
Douglas Jerrold.

Another note from Douglas Jerrold.

Douglas Jerrold to Lady Morgan.
West Lodge, Putney,
December 20.
Dear Lady Morgan,

The devil—the devil take him—brings me your hospitable summons for last night—here in the wilderness this morning! Next time, pray do remember—Putney! Gibbon’s Putney—Fairfax’s Putney—Cromwell’s Putney—the Marchioness of Shrewsbury’s Putney (where she held her horse whilst Buckingham
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made her a widow)—Putney, with a hundred other pleasant associations,—and the Putney of its humblest inhabitant, but

Yours faithfully,
Douglas Jerrold.

This year was also enlivened by a controversy between Lady Morgan and Cardinal Wiseman. Let any one who knew Lady Morgan imagine if she did not enjoy a pen-to-pen encounter with a great churchman on a statement made in her long-ago work on Italy! 1850 was, as the reader may or may not recollect, the date of the Papal Aggression; when England, for the first time since the Reformation, was adorned by a Cardinal. Public feeling ran high, and any pièce de circonstance was sure of meeting with readers. Lady Morgan, in her work on Italy, had said, concerning that relic of ancient upholstery, so carefully preserved in the Vatican—the Chair of St. Peter—“that the sacrilegious curiosity of the French broke through all obstacles to their seeing the chair of St. Peter. They actually removed its superb casket, and discovered the relic. Upon its mouldering and dusty surface were traced carvings, which bore the appearance of letters. The chair was quickly brought into a better light, the dust and cobwebs removed, and the inscription (for inscription it was) faithfully copied. The writing is in Arabic characters, and is the well-known confession of the Mahometan faith: “There is but one Cod, and Mahomet is his Prophet.” It is supposed that this chair had been,
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among the spoils of the Crusaders, offered to the Church at a time when a taste for antiquarian lore and the deciphering of inscriptions was not yet in fashion. This story has since been hushed up. the chair replaced, and none but the unhallowed remember the fact, and none but the audacious repeat it. Yet such there are even at Rome.”

This statement Dr. Wiseman had contradicted in a pamphlet written about 1833, and it might for ever have remained in the limbo assigned to pamphlets which reach their regulation term of a nine day’s life, if he had not been made a cardinal, and the bran new light from his title shone into the literary corners of “dusty death.”

Whether Lady Morgan had ever before seen or heard of the pamphlet in question is doubtful. She says herself, “I know not what rank your Eminence then held in that Church, of which you are now so brilliant an illustration, on your way to the ‘all-hail hereafter.’ It is a singular fact that I never saw this able attack of your Eminence on my work until lately; and so the thunders of the Vatican rolled over me innoxious. I heard, indeed, that a very learned diatribe had been written against my description of St. Peter’s chair; but I carelessly dismissed the subject with the observation of a French wit—
‘Que les gens d’esprit sont bêtes.’”
At any rate, the present occasion was too appropriate to resist; an Irishman could as soon have refrained from hitting a head at Donnybrook Fair, as Lady
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Morgan have abstained from a tilt with a Roman Catholic Church dignitary who had attacked a work of hers, no matter how many years before. She wrote, accordingly, a very lively brochure in her best style, entitled Letter to Cardinal Wiseman, in answer to his remarks on Lady Morgan’s statements regarding St. Peter’s Chair. It had a great success, both because it was amusing and because it was well-timed; and it had a run of criticisms in all the newspapers and journals of the day;—il faisait le frais of Punch, both in prose, and verse, and illustration, for several weeks; and it was to Lady Morgan a return of the beaux jours of her literary celebrity.

December 25.—Christmas day—my birthday; another and another still succeeds.

December 27.—Lots of notes and notices of my Letter to Cardinal Wiseman! It has had the run of all the newspapers. La petite vielle femme vit encore.


Lady Morgan, from age and weakness, was unable to be present on the 1st of May, 1851, at the opening of the Crystal palace in Hyde Park. But she paid a visit to that wonderful edifice early in June, and described the scene in a letter to her niece, under date of June 26.

I am leading a very gay life, for I think with so solitary a home as mine is, social excitement is almost necessary for me. I am, thank goodness, in better health than I have been for a long time. I will turn to mon livre des bénéfices and give you the cream of the day as it passed me, leaving the skim milk in oblivion.
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First, Lady Beauchamp’s grand majority rout (where I only staid half an hour) the heat and crowd was too much for me; but I had a “word and a blow,” with fifty of my particular friends—old Rogers in the thick of the fight. Next on my list, on the 24th a dinner at Wentworth Dilke’s; dinner excellent; company, the Earls of Carlisle and Granville, and all Her Majesty’s commissioners for the Exhibition, and many other eminent persons—a charming dinner. I must tell you of my visit to the Crystal Palace the other morning, where I have permission to go early, as I cannot encounter the crowd. It is impossible to convey an idea of the beauty of this miraculous building, as I saw it, in the bright sunshine and freshness of the morning, all silent and solitary! The fountains, flowers, statues and gold and silver draperies, and heaps of jewels, sparkling in the sun—a scene of magic, that one dreams of, but never till now was created. Whilst I was lost in wonder and admiration, and fixed in silent adoration of a beautiful statue, I heard a slight movement of feet, and sweet voices approaching me,—when lo! the whole royal party issued from an adjoining compartment; the Queen leaning on the arm of the King of the Belgians, in animated conversation,—Prince Albert looking both pleased and proud of this great and noble work. The children, with their governess, and the whole charming procession, preceded by our friend, Wentworth Dilke, chapeau bas! I never saw so happy a party—certainly, la Reine est la plus grande Reine du monde, as my dear Madame de Sevigné said of Le Roi, when he asked her to dance. The whole
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scene was a fairy tale in the Arabian Nights, and had for me a charm that I cannot explain; for there was before me, in that moment, all that was greatest and best, visible and invisible, and the sublime sun shining down his rays on this beautiful creation of man!

On my return from this palace of the genii, a charming Bohemian lady, Madame Noel, took me to a matinée, given for the benefit of the distressed Hungarians, for which I had passed tickets and subscribed; but it was a hot crowd with cold draughts. Fanny Kemble recited the divine Allegro and il Penseroso. It went to my very soul, where every line was impressed half a century back; but I returned tired and weary. Alas! I feel
“I am wearing away to the land of the leal.”
Still my spirits keep me afloat, and I am good for—
“A few gay soarings yet.”
Poor Rogers! I sat an hour with him the other day; he is the ghost of his former ghost; he talked with compassion of Moore’s state, who is now bed ridden, and has lost his memory,—remembers nothing but some of his own early songs, which he sings as he lies, and which is heart-rending to hear by those who are around him.

Moore lingered on a few months longer, and then passed away. Before this event happened, a catastrophe which still retains its fascination for the public—the burning of the Amazon—robbed Lady Morgan of a younger friend. This terrible disaster is the topic of the next letter.

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Mrs Gore to Lady Morgan.
Hamble Cliff, Southampton,
January 9.
My dear Lady Morgan,

I do not often bore you with letters, because I know it troubles you to read and answer them; but I cannot resist my inclination to write and ask you a question or two about poor Eliot Warburton, who, I remember was a friend of yours. I am happy to say I never even saw him; or a double pang would be added to my grief for the poor Amazon. I had watched all her experimental cruises, with much interest, and saluted her as she passed my lawn in triumphant beauty this day week! On the evening we received the news of her disaster, I sent off an express, nine miles, to get a second edition of the Times for the names of the passengers, and while my messenger was gone, solaced myself by reading Darien. I had just reached the chapter (at one in the morning) of which the motto is from Shelley,
The thirsty fire crept round his manly limbs,
His resolute eyes were scorched to blindness soon,
His death-pang rent my heart!
when the groom returned with the sad list containing poor Eliot Warburton’s fated name!

I cannot tell you how deeply I was shocked. What I want you to tell me is, whether he has left a wife and children (as well as talented brothers), and whether there was any occasion for him to cross the sea?
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which is, at this moment, looking as bright and beautiful under my windows as in one of Stanfield’s pictures, and as if incapable of mischief. My house has been full of juvenile visitors for the Christmas holidays. My son and daughter hunt three days a week—the latter you may infer to be well and happy, for she is often ten hours a day in the saddle, which is the home her soul delights in. I am afraid you are not as much delighted as myself that one is no longer obliged to travel so far as Persia to witness a perfect despotism—the best of all possible governments; the only one where one’s head feels quite safe on its shoulders,—till the day on which it is struck off. How I should like to see the press in England equally gagged: The Times sent to the Stone-Jug, and little Hayward to Cayenne! I am expecting Mr. Roebuck here to day, and feel it necessary to let my Toryism explode before he arrives. I am also much rejoiced to see the mouldy old Whig cabinet crumbling away like a stale cake. It has done so little to advance the cause of civilisation, that I am fain to believe we should be better off under the most stringent of conservatisms, provided they do not employ Dizzy, who is a radical at heart. I am very much disappointed in his memoirs of Lord George. I expected the book would amuse one by a world of absurdities; instead of which, it is as full of common sense and dulness as his best friends could wish.

A propos of friends, have you seen anything of Mr. Hope? Baillie Cochrane was here lately, who told me he had paid him a visit in the new house; that Mrs. Hope did the honours in the most ladylike manner,
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and was covered to the chin in crape for Lady Beresford. She spoke very pretty broken English, and has quite forgotten she was ever a French woman. The little daughter will be one of the richest heiresses in England, and I dare say we shall live to see her marry a duke.

Do not take the trouble of answering me yourself; let one of your servants be your amanuensis, I have no doubt they all write quite as well as our Hampshire squires. My children are out with the Hambledon hounds, or they would place themselves at your feet, as well, dear Lady Morgan,

Yours sincerely,
C. F. Gore.
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