exaggeration. Dr. Meryon says that the dish being removed, the maid
would again depart, and throw herself on her bed; and, as she wanted no
rocking, in ten minutes would be asleep. But, meanwhile, her mistress
would feel a twitch in some part of her body, and the bell would again
be rung. As servants, when fatigued, sleep sometimes so soundly as not
to hear, and sometimes are purposely deaf, Lady Hester Stanhope had got
in the quadrangle of her own apartments a couple of active fellows, a
part of whose business it was to watch by turns during the night, and
see that the maids answered the bell; they were, therefore, sure to be
roughly shaken out of their sleep, and, in going, half stupid, into her
ladyship's room, would be told to prepare a fomentation of chamomile, or
elder flowers, or mallows, or the like. The gardener was to be called,
water was to be boiled, and the house again was all in motion. During
these preparations the mistress would recollect some order she had
previously given about some honey, flower, or letter--no matter however
trivial--and the person charged with its execution would be summoned
from his bed, whatever might be the time, and questioned respecting it.
Nobody in Lady Hester's establishment was suffered to enjoy an interval
of rest.
* * * * *
A description of the bedchamber, which, for most purposes, was Lady
Hester's principal apartment, we shall now subjoin. It bore no
resemblance to an English or a French chamber, and, independent of its
furniture, was scarcely better than a common peasant's. The floor was of
cement. Across the room was hung a dirty red cotton curtain, to keep off
the wind when the door opened. There were three windows; one was nailed
up by its shutter on the outside, and one closed up by a bit of felt on
the inside; only the third, which looked on the garden, was reserved for
the admission of light and air. In two deep niches in the wall (which
was about three feet thick) were heaped on a shelf, equidistant from the
top and bottom, a few books, some bundles tied up in handkerchiefs,
writing paper, with sundry other articles of daily use--such as a white
plate, loaded with several pairs of scissors and two or three pairs of
spectacles, and another white plate with pins, sealing-wax, and wafers;
also, a common white inkstand, and the old parchment cover of some
merchant's daybook, with blotting paper inside, on which, spread on her
lap, as she sat up in bed, she generally wrote her letters.
She had neither watch, clock, nor timepiece; and when her physician
asked her why she had never purchased one, as a thing so essential to
good order in a household, she replied, "Because I cannot bear anything
that is unnatural; the sun is for the day, and the moon and stars for
the night, and by them I like to measure time."
A wooden stool by her bedside served for a table, and upon it stood a
variety of things to satisfy any sudden want or fancy; such as a little
strawberry preserve in a saucer, lemonade, chamomile tea, ipecacuanha
lozenges, a bottle of cold water. Of these she would take one or other
in succession, almost constantly. In a day or two fresh remedies or
concoctions would take their place. There would be a bottle of wine or
of violet syrup; anise seeds to masticate instead of cloves; quince
preserve; orgeat; a cup of cold tea; a pill-box.
Her bed was without curtains or mosquito net. An earthenware _ybrick_,
or jug, with a spout, stood in one of the windows, with a small copper
basin, and this constituted her washing appliances. There was no toilet
table; and when she washed herself, the copper basin was held before
her as she sat up in bed. Near the foot of the bed stood an upright,
ill-made walnut wood box, with a piece of green calico depending before
it. The windows were curtainless, and the felt with which one of them
was covered was held in its place by a faggot-stick, stuck tightly in,
from corner to corner diagonally. "Such was the chamber of Lord
Chatham's grand-daughter! Diogenes himself could not have found fault
with its appointments!" But the thoughtful observer will regret the
indulged self-will and the exaggerated egotism which placed in such a
position a woman whose powerful intellect might have been applied to the
benefit of the community. It is impossible not to see and feel that hers
was a wasted life.
It was this self-will, this colossal egotism that led her to spend so
much of her time in conversation--if those could be called conversations
in which one of the talkers insisted upon a monopoly of attention. It
would be more accurate to describe them as monologues, with occasional
interpolations of assent on the part of the listener. We have no wish to
underrate their charm, though, from the reports transmitted to
posterity, they would hardly seem to have deserved the very warm eulogy
pronounced by the physician, who says,[25] "Her conversations lasted
eight and ten hours at a time, without moving from her seat: so that,
although highly entertained, instructed, or astonished at her versatile
powers, as the listeners might be, it was impossible not to feel the
weariness of so long a sitting. Everybody," he adds, "who visited Lady
Hester Stanhope in her retirement will bear witness to her unexampled
colloquial powers; to her profound knowledge of character; to her
inexhaustible fund of anecdotes; to her talents for mimicry; to her
modes of narration, as various as the subjects she talked about; to the
lofty inspiration and sublimity of her language, when the subject
required it; and to her pathos and feeling, whenever she wished to
excite the emotions of her hearers. There was no secret of the human
heart, however studiously concealed, that she could not discover; no
workings in the listener's mind that she would not penetrate; no
intrigue, from the low cunning of vulgar intrigue to the vast
combinations of politics, that she would not unravel; no labyrinth,
however tortuous, that she would not thread. It was this comprehensive
and searching faculty, this intuitive penetration, which made her so
formidable; for under imaginary names, when she wished to show a person
that his character and course of life were unmasked to her view, she
would, in his very presence, paint him such a picture of himself, in
drawing the portrait of another, that you might see the individual
writhing on his chair, unable to conceal the effect the words had on his
conscience. Everybody who heard her for an hour or two retired humbled
from her presence, for her language was always directed to bring mankind
to their level, to pull down pride and conceit, to strip off the garb
of affectation, and to shame vice, immorality, irreligion, and
hypocrisy."
We have admitted Lady Hester Stanhope's great mental powers, but we can
find no trace in the records of her conversation of such extraordinary
genius as is here indicated. No doubt, she talked very well; but like
all great talkers, she sometimes talked very ill. The great attraction
of her conversation was its reflection of one strange personality: she
glassed herself in it as in a mirror; and as she had seen much, and
known many great men, and gone through a vast variety of experience, she
had always something to tell which was interesting. But how largely it
was informed by egotism, and how narrowly at times it escaped the
reproach of silliness, may be understood, I think, from the following
specimen:--
"Doctor," one day she said to her physician, "you have no religion: what
I mean by religion is, adoration of the Almighty. Religion, as people
profess it, is nothing but a dress. One man puts on one coat, and
another another. But the feeling that I have is quite a different thing,
and I thank God that He has opened my eyes. You will never learn of me,
because you cannot comprehend my ideas, and therefore it is of no use
teaching you. Nobody opens a book to an idiot, that would foam and
splutter over it; for you never could make him read. Ah! I see my way a
little before me, and God vouchsafes to enlighten me perhaps more than
other people....
"It was ever an object with me to search out why I came into the world,
what I ought to do in it, and where I shall go to. _God has given me the
extraordinary faculty of seeing into futurity_; for a clear judgment
becomes matter of fact. It has ever been my study to know myself. I may
thank God for my sufferings, as they have enabled me to dive deeper into
the subject than, I believe, any person living. The theory of the soul,
doctor, what an awful thing!
"My religion is to try to do as well as I can in God's eyes. That is the
only merit I have. I try to do the best I can. Some of the servants
sometimes talk about my religion--_dyn es Sytt_, as they call it--and I
let them talk; for they explain it to people by saying it is to do what
is right, and to avoid all uncleanliness.
"My views of the Creator are very different. I believe that all things
are calculated, and what is written is written; but I do not suppose
that the devil is independent of God: he receives his orders. Not that
God goes and gives them to him, any more than the big my lord goes and
gives orders to his shoe-black. There is some secondary being that does
that--some _intendant_.
"There are angels of different degrees, from the highest down to the
devil. It must be an awful sight to see an angel! There is something so
transcendent and beautiful in them, that a person must be half out of
his senses to brave the sight. For, when you are looking down, and
happen to raise your head, and there is the angel standing before you,
you can't say whether it came up through the earth, or down from the
sky, or how--there he is, and may go in the same way. But angels don't
appear to everybody. You know, doctor, you can't suppose that if you
were a dirty little apothecary, keeping a shop in a narrow street, a
prime minister would waste his time in going to call on you; or that, if
a man is sitting over his glass all the evening, or playing whist, or
lounging all the morning, an angel will come to him. But where there is
a mortal of high rectitude and integrity, then such a being may be
supposed to condescend to seek him out.
"God is my Friend--that is enough; and, if I am to see no happiness in
this world, my share of it, I trust, will be greater in the next, if I
am firm in the execution of those principles which He has inspired me
with."[26]
In reference to her inveterate love of smoking, her physician says,
"Much has been written in prose and verse on the advantages and mischief
of smoking tobacco.... All I can say is, that Lady Hester gave her
sanction to the practice by the habitual use of the long Oriental pipe,
which use dated from the year 1817, or thereabouts. In her bed, lying
with her pipe in her mouth, she would talk on politics, philosophy,
morality, religion, or on any other theme, with her accustomed
eloquence, and closing her periods with a whiff that would have made
the Duchess of Richmond stare with astonishment, could she have risen
from her tomb to have seen her quondam friend, the brilliant ornament of
a London drawing-room, clouded in fumes so that her features were
sometimes invisible. Now, this altered individual had not a covering to
her bed that was not burnt into twenty holes by the sparks and ashes
that had fallen from her pipe; and, had not these coverings been all
woollen, it is certain that, on some unlucky night, she must have been
consumed, bed and all.
"Her bedroom, at the end of every twenty-four hours, was strewed with
tobacco and ashes, to be swept away and again strewed as before; and it
was always strongly impregnated with the fumes.
"The finest tobacco the country could produce, and the cleanest pipes
(for she had a new one almost as often as a fop puts on new gloves),
could hardly satisfy her fastidiousness; and I have known her footman
get as many scoldings as there were days in the week on that score. From
curiosity, I once counted a bundle of pipes, thrown by after a day or
two's use, any one of which would have fetched five or ten shillings in
London, and there were 102. The woods she most preferred were jessamine,
rose, and cork. She never smoked cherry-wood pipes, from their weight,
and because she liked cheaper ones, which she could renew oftener. She
never arrived at that perfectibility, which is seen in many smokers, of
swallowing the fumes, or of making them pass out at her nostrils. The
pipe was to her what a fan was, or is, in a lady's hand--a means of
having something to do. She forgot it when she had a letter to write, or
any serious occupation. It is not so with the studious and literary man,
who fancies it helps reflection or promotes inspiration."[27]
FOOTNOTES:
[20] "Eoethen," pp. 87, 88.
[21] Alphonse de Lamartine: "Voyage en Orient." Lamartine's version of
Lady Hester's conversation is sometimes of dubious accuracy.
[22] "Eoethen," pp. 81, 82. In the following narrative we very frequently
adopt, with slight alteration and condensation, Mr. Kinglake's language.
[23] The branch which obtains AEneas admission to the shades (AEneid, Book
vi.)--
"This branch at least"--and here she showed
The branch within her raiment stowed--
"You needs must own"...
He answers not, but eyes the sheen
Of the blest bough.
[24] "Eoethen," pp. 97, 98.
[25] "Memoirs of Lady Hester Stanhope," i. 135, 136.
[26] "Memoirs of Lady Hester Stanhope," i. 142-144.
[27] "Memoirs of Lady Hester Stanhope," iii. 189, 190.
LADY BRASSEY.
Most of our readers will be familiar with the exciting story of voyages
round the world; with that famous circumnavigation by Magellan, which
first found an ocean-way between the West and the East, and carried a
furrow across the broad waters of the Pacific; that scarcely less famous
circumnavigation of Drake's, which made the English flag known on the
southern seas; that great voyage of Cook's, which added so many lands,
hitherto unknown, to the map of the inhabited globe, down to later
circumnavigations, accomplished for scientific objects by ships equipped
with the most perfect appliances. Storm and wreck and calm; intercourse
with savages who look with wonder on the white sails that have come up
from the under-world; the wash of waters upon coral-reefs; the shadow of
green palms upon lonely isles; strange sea-weeds floating on the deep
green wave, and flying-fish hunted by voracious foes; long days and
nights spent under glowing skies, without a glimpse of land; the
breathless eagerness with which some new shore is sighted--with such
incidents as these we English are necessarily familiar, possessing as we
do a vast and various literature of the sea. And yet our appetite never
grows weary of the old, old tale; there is a romance about it which
never seems to fade--like the sea itself it seems ever to present some
fresh and novel aspect.
And such an aspect it certainly wears when it is told by a woman, as it
has been told by Lady Brassey, one of the most adventurous and agreeable
of lady-voyagers. Told, too, with a literary skill and a refined taste
which have greatly charmed the public, and given a permanent value to
her rapid record. There is no affectation of high-wrought adventure or
heroic enterprise about it. Lady Brassey describes only what she has
seen--and she saw a great deal. She invents nothing and she magnifies
nothing; her narrative is as plain and unvarnished as a ship's log-book.
The yacht _Sunbeam_ in which Lady (she was then simply Mrs.) Brassey
accomplished her voyage round the world was a screw three-masted
schooner, of 530 tons, with engines of thirty-five horse-power, and a
speed of 10 to 13 knots an hour. She was 157 feet in length, with an
extreme breadth of twenty-seven and a-half feet. Belonging to a wealthy
English gentleman, she was richly appointed, and fitted up with a
luxurious splendour which would have driven wild with envy and
admiration the earlier circumnavigators. Leaving Chatham on the 1st of
July, 1876, she ran off Beachy Head on the following evening, dropped
anchor off Cowes next morning, and early on the 6th passed through the
Needles.
"We were forty-three on board, all told," says Mrs. Brassey, the party
then including her husband and herself and their four children, some
friends, a sailing master, boatswain, carpenter, able-bodied seamen,
engineers, firemen, stewards, cooks, nurse, stewardess, and lady's maid.
On the 8th they were fairly away from Old England. Next day, in the
afternoon, they rounded Ushant, at the distance of a mile and a-half:
"the sea was tremendous, the waves breaking in columns of spray against
the sharp needle-like rocks that form the point of the island." Two days
later, Mrs. Brassey had her first rough experience of the sea. "We were
all sitting or standing," she says, "about the stern of the vessel,
admiring the magnificent dark blue billows following us, with their
curling white crests, mountains high. Each wave, as it approached,
appeared as if it must overwhelm us, instead of which it rushed grandly
by, rolling and shaking us from stem to stern, and sending fountains of
spray on board. Tom (Mr. Brassey) was looking at the stern compass,
Allnutt being close to him. Mr. Bingham and Mr. Freer were smoking,
half-way between the quarter-deck and the after-companion, where Captain
Brown, Dr. Potter, Muriel, and I were standing. Captain Lecky, seated on
a large coil of rope, placed on the box of the rudder, was spinning
Mabelle a yarn. A new hand was steering, and just at the moment when an
unusually big wave overtook us, he unfortunately allowed the vessel to
broach to a little. In a second the sea came pouring over the stern,
above Allnutt's head. The boy was nearly washed overboard, but he
managed to catch hold of the rail, and, with great presence of mind,
stuck his knees into the bulwarks. Kindred, our boatswain, seeing his
danger, rushed forward to save him, but was knocked down by the return
wave, from which he emerged gasping. The coll of rope, on which Captain
Lecky and Mabelle were seated, was completely floated by the sea.
Providentially, however, he had taken a double turn round his wrist with
a reefing point, and throwing his other arm round Mabelle, held on like
grim death; otherwise nothing could have saved them. She was perfectly
self-possessed, and only said quietly, "Hold on, Captain Lecky, hold
on!" to which he replied, "All right." I asked her afterwards if she
thought she was going overboard, and she answered, "I did not _think_ at
all, mamma, but felt sure we were gone." Captain Lecky, long accustomed
to very large ships, had not in the least realized how near we were to
the water in our little vessel, and was proportionately taken by
surprise. All the rest of the party were drenched, with the exception of
Muriel, whom Captain Brown held high above the water in his arms, and
who lost no time in remarking, in the midst of the general confusion,
"I'm not at all wet, I'm not." Happily, the children don't know what
fear is. The maids, however, were very frightened, as some of the sea
had got down into the nursery, and the skylights had to be screwed down.
Our studding sail boom, too, broke with a loud crack when the ship
broached to, and the jaws of the fore-boom gave way.
"Soon after this adventure we all went to bed, full of thankfulness that
it had ended as well as it did, but, alas! not, so far as I was
concerned, to rest in peace. In about two hours I was awakened by a
tremendous weight of water suddenly descending upon me and flooding the
bed. I immediately sprang out, only to find myself in another pool on
the floor. It was pitch dark, and I could not think what had happened;
so I rushed on deck, and found that, the weather having moderated a
little, some kind sailor, knowing my love of fresh air, had opened the
skylight rather too soon, and one of the angry waves had popped on
board, deluging the cabin.
"I got a light and proceeded to mop up as best I could, and then
endeavoured to find a dry place to sleep in. This, however, was no easy
task, for my own bed was drenched and every other berth occupied; the
deck, too, was ankle-deep in water, as I found when I tried to get
across to the deck-house sofa. At last I lay down on the floor, wrapped
up in my ulster, and wedged between the foot-stanchions of our swing bed
and the wardrobe athwart ship; so that, as the yacht rolled heavily, my
feet were often higher than my head. Consequently what sleep I snatched
turned into a nightmare, of which the fixed idea was a broken head,
from the three hundredweight of lead at the bottom of our bed swinging
wildly from side to side and up and down, as the vessel rolled and
pitched, suggesting all manner of accidents. When morning came at last
the weather cleared a good deal, though the breeze continued. All hands
were soon busily employed in repairing damages; and very picturesque the
deck and rigging of the _Sunbeam_ looked, with the various groups of men
occupied upon the ropes, spars, and sails. Towards evening the wind fell
light, and we had to get up steam. The night was the first really warm
one we had enjoyed, and the stars shone out brightly; the sea, which had
been of a lovely blue colour during the day, showed a slight
phosphorescence after dark."
The voyage, which opened in this stirring manner, proved not less
prosperous than pleasant, and was unmarked by any striking adventures,
though not devoid of interesting incidents. By way of the Cape de Verde
Islands and Madeira, the _Sunbeam_ kept southward to the Equator, and
gradually drew near the coast of South America, until it touched at the
Brazilian capital, Rio de Janeiro. Thence it ran southward to the River
Plate, skirted the Patagonian shores, and, threading its way through the
defiles of the Magellan Strait, emerged into the Southern Ocean. A
northerly course took it to the great sea-port of Chili--Valparaiso,
whence it reached across the Pacific to the beautiful group of the
Society Islands, visiting Tahiti, the Eden of the southern seas. The
Sandwich Islands are almost the same distance north as the Society are
south of the Equator. Here Lady Brassey was received with great
hospitality, and surveyed the new and rising civilization of Hawaii with
much interest. In the track of the trade winds the voyagers crossed the
Pacific, which, so far as they were concerned, justified its name, to
Japan; thence they proceeded to Hong-Kong, and through the Straits of
Malacca to Penang. Ceylon lies on the farther side of the Bay of Bengal.
From Ceylon they sailed to Aden, at the mouth of the Red Sea, one of
those strong strategical points by which England keeps open the
ocean-highways to her commercial fleets. Through the Suez Canal the
_Sunbeam_ passed into the Mediterranean, "whose shores are empires,"
touching at Malta and at "the Rock," which the enterprise of Sir George
Rorke gave, and the patient courage of General Eliott preserved, to
England. Entering the familiar waters of the Atlantic, it put into
Lisbon, and afterwards fell into the track for "home," sighting the
first English land, the Start, very early in the morning of the 26th of
May. At midnight the voyagers reached Beachy Head, and could see the
lights of Hastings in the distance. At half-past six on the 27th they
landed there, and were warmly greeted by a multitude of well-wishers.
In our limited space it would be impossible for us to follow up very
closely a voyage which covered so large a part of the world's surface;
nor is it necessary, since Lady Brassey's charmingly written narrative
is now well known to every reader; but we shall permit ourselves the
pleasure of seeing, as Lady Brassey saw, a picture here and there of
beautiful scenery or foreign manners, that we may judge of the
impression it produced on so accomplished an observer. Lady Brassey
evidently belongs not to the _nil admirari_ school, but enjoys keenly
and heartily everything that is fresh and new--a bright bit of colour or
a picturesque detail. It is this which makes her book so enjoyable.
There is no affectation in its pages--no airs of conscious superiority;
and we feel that we are in the company of a woman with a woman's
heart--of a woman with broad sympathies and a happy nature.
Our first visit, with Lady Brassey as our guide, shall be to the market
at Rio de Janeiro.[28]