There is more of the patter and fun of fashion in Lady Morgan's books
than in any other chronicles of the _ton_. Her last work, the _Book of
the Boudoir_, to use an Hibernicism, is not yet published; but from one
of its scenes shifted into the _Court Journal_, we pick the following
anecdote of John Kemble and her ladyship, (then Miss Owenson), about
twenty years since. All the town were then running mad after her "wild
Irish girl," and Miss O. was invited to a blue-stocking party, at the
mansion of the Dowager Countess of Cork, in New Burlington Street.
"Mr. Kemble was announced. Lady C----k reproached him as 'the late Mr.
Kemble;' and then, looking significantly at me, told him who I was.
Kemble, to whom I had been already presented by Mrs. Lefanu,
acknowledged me by a kindly nod; but the intense stare which succeeded,
was not one of mere recognition. It was the glazed, fixed look, so
common to those who have been making libations to altars which rarely
qualify them for ladies' society. Mr. Kemble was evidently much
pre-occupied, and a little exalted; and he appeared actuated by some
intention, which he had the will, but not the power, to execute. He was
seated _vis-à-vis_, and had repeatedly raised his arm, and stretched it
across the table, for the purpose, as I supposed, of helping himself to
some boar's head in jelly. Alas, no!--the _bore_ was, that my head
happened to be the object which fixed his tenacious attention; and which
being a true Irish _cathah_ head, dark, cropped, and curly, and struck
him as a particularly well organized Brutus, and better than any in his
_repertoire_ of theatrical perukes. Succeeding at last in his feline and
fixed purpose, he actually struck his claws in my locks, and addressing
me in the deepest sepulchral tones, asked--"Little girl, where did you
buy your wig?"
Lord Erskine "came to the rescue," and liberated my head.
Lord Carysfort exclaimed, to relieve the awkwardness of the scene,
"_les serpents de l'envie ont sifflés dans son coeur_;" on every side--
"Some did laugh,
And some did say, God bless us,"
--while I, like Macbeth--
"Could not say, Amen."
Meantime Kemble, peevish, as half-tipsy people generally are, and ill
brooking the interference of the two peers, drew back, muttering and
fumbling in his coat-pocket, evidently with some dire intent lowering in
his eyes. To the amusement of all, and to my increased consternation, he
drew forth a volume of the "Wild Irish Girl," (which he had brought to
return to Lady C----k) and, reading, with his deep, emphatic voice, one
of the most high-flown of its passages, he paused, and patting the page
with his forefinger, with the look of Hamlet addressing Polonius, he
said, "Little girl, why did you write such nonsense? And where did you
get all these d--d hard words?"
Thus taken by surprise, and "smarting with my wounds" or mortified
authorship, I answered, unwittingly and witlessly, the truth: "Sir,
I wrote as well as I could, and I got the hard words out of Johnson's
Dictionary."
The eloquence of Erskine himself would have pleaded my cause with less
effect; and the "_J'y allois_" of _La Fontaine_ was not quoted with more
approbation in the circles of Paris, than the _naïveté_ of my equally
veracious and spontaneous reply. The triumph of my simplicity did not
increase Kemble's good humour; and, shortly after, Mr. Spenser carried
him off in his carriage, to prevent any further attacks on my
unfortunate head--inside or out.
* * * * *