who was equally surprised and delighted at your liberal arrangement
about the ‘Lady of the Rock.’ I will put all the names to rights, and
retain enough of locality and personality to please the antiquary,
without the least risk of bringing the clan Gillian about our ears. I
went through the theatre, which is the most complete little thing of
the kind I ever saw, elegantly fitted up, and large enough for every
purpose.... With regard to the equipment of the ‘Family Legend,’ I have
been much diverted at a discovery which I have made. I had occasion
to visit our Lord Provost (by profession a stocking-weaver), and was
surprised to find the worthy magistrate filled with a new-born zeal
for the drama. He spoke of Mr. Siddons’ merits with enthusiasm, and of
Miss Baillie’s powers almost with tears of rapture. Being a curious
investigator of cause and effect, I never rested until I found out that
this theatric rage which had seized his lordship of a sudden, was
owing to a large order for hose, pantaloons, and plaids for equipping
the rival clans of Campbell and Maclean, and which Siddons was sensible
enough to send to the warehouse of our excellent provost.”
Three months later he thus communicates the result of the experiment:
[Sidenote: Scott’s account of its success.]
“You have only to imagine all that you could wish to give success to a
play, and your conceptions will still fall short of the complete and
decided triumph of the ‘Family Legend.’ The house was crowded to a most
extraordinary degree; many people had come from your native capital
of the west; everything that pretended to distinction, whether from
rank or literature, was in the boxes, and in the pit such an aggregate
mass of humanity as I have seldom, if ever, witnessed in the same
space.... I sat the whole time shaking for fear a scene-shifter, or a
carpenter, or some of the subaltern actors, should make some blunder
and interrupt the feeling of deep and general interest. The scene on
the rock struck the utmost possible effect into the audience, and you
heard nothing but sobs on all sides. The banquet-scene was equally
impressive, and so was the combat. Of the greater scenes, that between
Lorn and Helen in the castle of Maclean, that between Helen and her
lover, and the examination of Maclean himself in Argyle’s castle, were
applauded to the very echo. Siddons announced the play ‘for the rest of
the week,’ which was received not only with a thunder of applause, but
with cheering and throwing up of hats and handkerchiefs. Mrs. Siddons
supported her part incomparably.... The scenery was very good, and
the rock, without the appearance of pantomime, was so contrived as to
place Mrs. Siddons in a very precarious situation to all appearance.
The dresses were more tawdry than I should have judged proper, but
expensive and showy. I got my brother John’s Highland recruiting party
to reinforce the garrison of Inverary, and as they mustered beneath
the porch of the castle, and seemed to fill the courtyard behind, the
combat scene had really the appearance of reality.... My kind respects
attend Miss Agnes Baillie, and believe me ever your obliged and
faithful servant,
WALTER SCOTT.”
J. G. LOCKHART: ‘The Life of Sir Walter Scott.’ Edinburgh: Adam &
Charles Black, 1871.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Opinion of ‘Orra.’]
It is too little to say that I am enchanted with the third volume [of
‘Plays on the Passions’], especially with the two first plays, which
in every point not only sustain, but even exalt your reputation as
a dramatist. [Miss Baillie had written him that this was to be her
last publication, and that she was “getting her knitting-needles in
order”----meaning to begin her new course of industry by making him a
purse.] The whole character of ‘Orra’ is exquisitely supported as well
as imagined, and the language distinguished by a rich variety of fancy,
which I know no instance of excepting in Shakespeare. After I had read
‘Orra’ twice to myself, Terry [the comedian, Scott’s warm friend and
admirer] read it over to us a third time, aloud, and I have seldom
seen a little circle so much affected as during the whole fifth act. I
think it would act charmingly.... Yet I have a great quarrel with this
beautiful drama, for you must know that you have utterly destroyed a
song of mine, precisely in the turn of your outlaw’s ditty, and sung by
persons in somewhat the same situation.... I took out my unfortunate
manuscript to look at it, but alas! it was the encounter of the iron
and the earthen pitchers in the fable. I was clearly sunk, and the
potsherds not worth gathering up. But only conceive that the chorus
should have run thus _verbatim_----
“’Tis mirk midnight with peaceful men,
With us ’tis dawn of day”----
and again----
“Then boot and saddle, comrades boon,
Nor wait the dawn of day.”
[Note by Lockhart: These lines were accordingly struck out of the
outlaw’s song in ‘Rokeby.’ The verses of ‘Orra,’ to which Scott
alludes, are no doubt the following:
“The wild fire dances on the fen,
The red star sheds its ray,
Up rouse ye then, my merry men,
It is our opening day.”]
To return, I really think ‘Fear’ the most dramatic passion you have
hitherto touched, because capable of being drawn to the most extreme
paroxysm on the stage. In ‘Orra’ you have all gradations, from a
timidity excited by a strong and irritable imagination, to the
extremity which altogether unhinges the understanding.
SIR WALTER SCOTT: _Letter to Joanna Baillie_, in the former’s ‘Life,’
by J. G. Lockhart.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Joanna’s personal appearance.]
She is small in figure, and her gait is mean and shuffling, but her
manners are those of a well-bred woman. She has none of the unpleasant
airs too common to literary ladies. Her conversation is sensible. She
possesses apparently considerable information, is prompt without being
forward, and has a fixed judgment of her own, without any disposition
to force it on others. Wordsworth said of her with warmth: “If I had to
present any one to a foreigner as a model of an English gentlewoman, it
would be Joanna Baillie.”
HENRY CRABB ROBINSON: _Diary_, 1812, in ‘Diary, Reminiscences and
Correspondence.’ Boston: J. R. Osgood & Co., 1871.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Several years later.]
I remember her as singularly impressive in look and manner, with the
“queenly” air we associate with ideas of high birth and lofty rank. Her
face was long, narrow, dark, and solemn, and her speech deliberate and
considerate, the very antipodes of “chatter.” Tall in person,[9] and
habited according to the mode of an olden time, her picture, as it is
now present to me, is that of a very venerable dame, dressed in coif
and kirtle, stepping out, as it were, from a frame in which she had
been placed by the painter Vandyke.
S. C. HALL: ‘A Book of Memories of Great Men and Women of the Age.’
London: Virtue & Co., 1871.
* * * * *
She was past fifty when I first saw her, and appeared like an old lady
to me, then in my teens. She dressed like an aged person, and with
scrupulous neatness. She lived with a sister who looked older still,
because she had not the vivacity of Joanna, and was only distinguished
for the amiability with which she bore being outshone by her more
gifted relative.
[Sidenote: “Mrs.” Baillie.]
Miss Baillie, according to the English custom, took the title of
Mrs. Joanna Baillie, on passing her fiftieth birthday. She gave the
prettiest and the pleasantest dinners, and presided at them with
peculiar grace and tact, always attentive to the wants of her guests,
and yet keeping up a lively conversation the while. She took such
pleasure in writing poetry, and especially in her ‘Plays on the
Passions,’ that she said, “If no one ever read them, I should find my
happiness in writing them.”
Though she was young when she left her native land, she never lost
her Scotch accent. I thought it made her conversation only the more
piquant. She was full of anecdotes and curious facts about remarkable
people. I only recollect her telling one of Lord Byron being obliged,
by politeness, to escort her and her sister to the opera, and her
perceiving that he was provoked beyond measure at being there with
them, and that he made faces as he sat behind them.
ELIZA FARRAR: ‘Recollections of Seventy Years.’ Boston: Ticknor and
Fields, 1866.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Old age.]
Of Joanna Baillie I saw much both as a friend and patient. Her gentle
simplicity, with a Scotch tinge coloring it to the end of life, won
the admiration even of those who knew nothing of her power of dramatic
poetry. It was pleasant to visit her in the quiet house at Hampstead,
in which she lived with her sister Agnes. She reached, I think, her
ninety-second year.[10] Agnes lived to a hundred.
SIR HENRY HOLLAND: ‘Recollections of Past Life.’ New York: D. Appleton
& Co., 1872.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: “Dry and Scotchy.”]
Our great poetess, or rather the sensible, amiable old lady that
_was_ a great poetess thirty years ago, is still in full preservation
as to health. Never did the flame of genius more thoroughly expire
than in her case.... She is, as Mr. Wordsworth observes, when quoting
her non-feeling for Lycidas, “dry and Scotchy”; learning she never
possessed, and some of her poetry, which I think was far above that of
any other woman, is the worse for a few specks of bad English; then her
criticisms are so surprisingly narrow and jejune, and show so slight an
acquaintance with fine literature in general.
[Sidenote: A gracious winter.]
Yet if the authoress of ‘Plays on the Passions’ does not now write or
talk like a poetess, she _looks_ like one, and _is_ a piece of poetry
in herself. Never was old age more lovely and interesting; the face,
the dress, the quiet, subdued motions, the silver hair, the calm
_in-looking_ eye, the pale, yet not unhealthy skin, all are in harmony;
this is winter with its own peculiar loveliness of snows and paler
sunshine.
SARA COLERIDGE: _Letter to Miss E. Trevenen_, 1833, in the former’s
‘Memoir and Letters,’ edited by her daughter. New York: Harper & Bros.,
1874.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Meeting with Harriet Martineau.]
She had enjoyed a fame almost without parallel, and had outlived
it. She had been told every day for years, through every possible
channel, that she was second only to Shakespeare--if second; and then
she had seen her works drop out of notice so that, of the generation
who grew up before her eyes, not one in a thousand had read a line
of her plays--yet was her serenity never disturbed, nor her merry
humor in the least dimmed. I have never lost the impression of the
trying circumstances of my first interview with her, nor of the grace,
simplicity and sweetness with which she bore them. She was old; and she
declined dinner-parties; but she wished to meet me, ... and therefore
she came to Miss Berry’s to tea, one day when I was dining there. Miss
Berry, her contemporary, put her feelings, it seemed to me, to a most
unwarrantable trial, by describing to me, as we three sat together,
the celebrity of the ‘Plays on the Passions’ in their day. She told
me how she found on her table, on her return from a ball, a volume of
plays; and how she kneeled on a chair to look at it, and how she read
on till the servant opened the shutters, and let in the daylight of a
winter morning. She told me how all the world raved about the plays;
and she held on so long that I was in pain for the noble creature to
whom it must have been irksome on the one hand to hear her own praises
and fame so dwelt upon, and, on the other, to feel that we all knew how
long that had been quite over. But, when I looked up at her sweet face,
with its composed smile amidst the becoming mob-cap, I saw that she was
above pain of either kind.
HARRIET MARTINEAU: ‘Autobiography.’ Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co.,
1877.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The home at Hampstead.]
We drove out, by appointment, to Mrs. Joanna Baillie’s, at Hampstead,
took our lunch with her, and passed the time at her house till four
o’clock. We found her living in a small and most comfortable, nice,
unpretending house, where she has dwelt for above thirty years. She is
now above seventy, and, dressed with an exact and beautiful propriety,
received us most gently and kindly. Her accent is still Scotch; her
manner strongly marked with that peculiar modesty which you sometimes
see united to the venerableness of age, and which is then so very
winning; and her conversation, always quiet and never reminding
you of her own claims as an author, is so full of good sense, with
occasionally striking and decisive remarks, and occasionally a little
touch of humor, that I do not know when I have been more pleased and
gratified than I was by this visit.
She lives exactly as an English gentlewoman of her age and character
should live, and everything about her was in good taste and appropriate
to her position, even down to the delicious little table she had spread
for us in her quiet parlor.
GEORGE TICKNOR: _Diary_, 1835, in ‘Life, Letters, and Journals.’
Boston: J. R. Osgood & Co., 1876.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Serene old age.]
A sweeter picture of old age was never seen. Her figure was small,
light, and active; her countenance, in its expression of sincerity,
harmonized wonderfully with her gay conversation and her cheerful
voice. Her eyes were beautiful, dark, bright, and penetrating, with
the full, innocent gaze of childhood. Her face was altogether comely,
and her dress did justice to it. She wore her own silvery hair and a
mob-cap, with its delicate lace border fitting close round her face.
She was well-dressed in handsome dark silks, and her lace caps and
collars looked always new. No Quaker ever was neater, while she kept up
with the times in her dress as in her habit of mind, as far as became
her years. In her whole appearance there was always something for
even the passing stranger to admire, and never anything for the most
familiar friend to wish otherwise.
HARRIET MARTINEAU: Quoted in ‘Songstresses of Scotland.’
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Taste in dress.]
She wore a delicate lavender satin bonnet; and Mrs. J---- says she is
fond of dress, and knows what every one has on. Her taste is certainly
exquisite in dress. I more than ever admired the harmony of expression
and tint, the silver hair and silvery gray eye, the pale skin, and
the look which speaks of a mind that has had much communing with
high imagination, though such intercourse is only perceptible now by
the absence of everything which that lofty spirit would not set his
seal upon.... Age has slackened the active part of genius, and yet
is in some sort a substitute for it. There is a declining of mental
exercitation. She has had enough of that; and now for a calm decline,
and thoughts of Heaven.
SARA COLERIDGE: _Letter to her husband_, 1834, in, ‘Memoir and
Letters,’ edited by her daughter.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Enthusiasm for Scott.]
She talked of Scott with a tender enthusiasm that was contagious, and
of Lockhart with a kindness that is uncommon when coupled with his
name, and which seemed only characteristic of her benevolence. It is
very rare that old age, or, indeed, any age, is found so winning and
agreeable. I do not wonder that Scott in his letters treats her with
more deference, and writes to her with more care and beauty, than to
any other of his correspondents.
GEORGE TICKNOR: _Diary_, 1838, in ‘Life, Letters and Journals.’
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Disposition of her earnings.]
Unlike Zaccheus the publican in every other respect, she followed his
rule with respect to the earnings of her pen--half of her goods she
gave to feed the poor. This arrangement was made and adhered to, when
the Baillies’ income, never a very large one, was at its minimum; and
it was not departed from when increased funds brought in their train
increased expenditures and a host of additional wants.
SARAH TYTLER AND J. L. WATSON: ‘Songstresses of Scotland.’
FOOTNOTES:
[9] Mr. Hall’s testimony on this point differs from that of all others
who have described Miss Baillie.
[10] An error. Miss Baillie died at eighty-nine.
MARGUERITE, LADY BLESSINGTON.
1789-1849.
MARGUERITE, LADY BLESSINGTON.
Marguerite, Lady Blessington, flitted across the field of English
literature like a blue butterfly, and left no trace behind. She claims
a place among our literary women, not by virtue of her many works,
which are now forgotten, but rather as an influence among literary men;
as the woman in whose sunny companionship Byron basked, and who had
Landor and Procter to write her epitaphs.
She was born at Knockbrit, Tipperary, on the 1st of September, 1789.
(The year, however, has been variously stated as 1787 and 1790.) She
was the daughter of Edmund Power, a country gentleman and magistrate,
a man of violent temper and without principle. In 1796 or ’97 the
Powers removed to Clonmel. In 1804, when she was under fifteen years
of age, Marguerite was forced by her father into a marriage with the
vicious and half-insane Captain Maurice Farmer. Within a year they
agreed to separate. Mrs. Farmer is spoken of as residing in Cahir,
Tipperary, in 1807, and in Dublin in 1809. And now occurs that hiatus
in the account of her life which has never been satisfactorily filled,
and the existence of which the English women of her day refused to
overlook. In 1816 she was established in Manchester Square, London;
and in 1818, Captain Farmer having died the previous year, she married
the Earl of Blessington. Her fashionable life, foreign travels, and
literary career now began. In 1823, while at Genoa with her husband,
she made the acquaintance of Lord Byron. In 1829 Lord Blessington died
in the Hotel Ney, Paris, which had been sumptuously fitted up as his
residence. Lady Blessington returned to London in 1830. She lived in
Seamore Place, May Fair, until 1836, when she removed to Gore House,
Kensington Gore. The extravagant splendor of her style of living, and
the charm of her evenings, have often been described. The £2,000 a
year which Lord Blessington had left her, even with the addition of
the income received from her writings, was not sufficient to meet the
expenses which long habit had rendered almost necessary to her; and
in the spring of 1849 “the long-menaced break-up of the establishment
at Gore House took place.” Lady Blessington left London, accompanied
by her nieces, for Paris, where, on the 4th of June, 1849, she died
very suddenly of “an apoplectic malady, complicated with disease of
the heart.” Count D’Orsay, her husband’s son-in-law and her intimate
friend, survived her but a few years, and was buried beside her at
Chambourcy, where he had caused a huge monument to be erected to her
memory.
The following are the works of Lady Blessington:
_The Magic Lantern; or, Sketches of Scenes in the Metropolis_, 1822.
_Sketches and Fragments_, 1822.
_Conversations with Lord Byron_, 1832. These articles first appeared in
Colburn’s _New Monthly Magazine_.
_Grace Cassidy; or, the Repealers_, 1833.
_Meredyth_, 1833.
_The Follies of Fashion_, 1835.
_The Two Friends_, 1835.
_The Victims of Society_, 1837.
_The Confessions of an Elderly Lady_, 1838.
_The Governess_, 1839.
_Desultory Thoughts and Reflections_, 1839.
_The Idler in Italy_, 1839.
_The Idler in France_, 1841.
_The Lottery of Life_, 1842.
_Strathern; or, Life at Home and Abroad_, 1845.
_The Memoirs of a Femme de Chambre_, 1846.
_Lionel Deerhurst_, 1846.
_Marmaduke Herbert_, 1847.
_Country Quarters._ This was first published in a London Sunday paper,
1848. After Lady Blessington’s death it was edited by her niece, Miss
Power, and published separately.
She also wrote _A Tour Through the Netherlands to Paris_, _Confessions
of an Elderly Gentleman_, _The Belle of a Season_, and edited for
several years Heath’s ‘Book of Beauty,’ ‘The Keepsake,’ and another
annual entitled, ‘Gems of Beauty.’ Miss Power says in her memoir, “I
believe that for some years she made, on an average, somewhere about a
thousand a year; some years a good deal above that sum.” Jerdan states
that he has known her to enjoy from her pen an amount between £2,000
and £3,000 per annum; and adds that her title and her social tact had
considerable influence in commanding high prices.
Lady Blessington’s strange life may be said to have been written in
three chapters: the first as dark and terrible as any in ‘Wuthering
Heights’; the second as gorgeous as any in the novels of D’Israeli;
and the last like a handful of leaves torn from ‘Vanity Fair.’
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Sickly childhood.]
Beauty, the heritage of the family, was, in her early youth, denied to
Marguerite: her eldest brother and sister were singularly handsome and
healthy children, while she, pale, weakly, and ailing, was for years
regarded as little likely ever to grow to womanhood; the precocity
of her intellect, the keenness of her perceptions, and her extreme
sensitiveness, all of which are so often regarded, more especially
among the Irish, as the precursive symptoms of an early death,
confirmed this belief, and the poor, pale, reflective child was long
looked upon as doomed to a premature grave.
The atmosphere in which she lived was but little congenial to such a
nature. Her father, a man of violent temper, and little given to study
the characters of his children, intimidated and shook the delicate
nerves of the sickly child, though there were moments--rare ones, it
is true--when the sparkles of her early genius for an instant dazzled
and gratified him. Her mother, though she failed not to bestow the
tenderest maternal care on the health of the little sufferer, was
not capable of appreciating her fine and subtile qualities, and her
brothers and sisters, fond as they were of her, were not, in their high
health and boisterous gayety, companions suited to such a child.
At a very early age, the powers of her imagination had already begun
to develop themselves. She would entertain her brothers and sisters
for hours with tales invented as she proceeded; and at last, so
remarkable did this talent become, that her parents, astonished at the
interest and coherence of her narrations, constantly called upon her
to _improviser_ for the entertainment of their friends and neighbors, a
task always easy to her fertile brain; and, in a short time, the little
neglected child became the wonder of the neighborhood.
MISS POWER: ‘A Memoir of Lady Blessington,’ quoted by R. R. Madden in
‘The Literary Life and Correspondence of the Countess of Blessington.’
New York: Harper & Bros., 1855.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Unfortunate early marriage.]
Her father was in a ruined position at the time Lady Blessington was
brought home from school, a mere child, and treated as such. Among his
military friends, she then saw a Captain Farmer for the first time; he
appeared on very intimate terms with her father, but when she first
met him, her father did not introduce her to him; in fact, she was
looked upon then as a mere school-girl, whom it was not necessary to
introduce to any stranger. In a day or two her father told her she was
not to return to school; he had decided that she was to marry Captain
Farmer. This intelligence astonished her; she burst out crying, and a
scene ensued in which his menaces and her protestations against his
determination terminated violently. Her mother unfortunately sided with
her father, and eventually, by caressing entreaties and representations
of the advantages her father looked forward to from this match with
a man of Captain Farmer’s affluence, she was persuaded to sacrifice
herself, and to marry a man for whom she felt the utmost repugnance.
She had not been long under her husband’s roof before it became evident
to her that her husband was subject to fits of insanity, and his own
relatives informed her that her father had been acquainted by them that
Captain Farmer had been insane; but this information had been concealed
from her by her father. She lived with him about three months, and
during that time he frequently treated her with personal violence;
... he used to lock her up whenever he went abroad, and often has
left her without food till she felt almost famished. He was ordered
to join his regiment, which was encamped at the Curragh of Kildare.
Lady Blessington refused to accompany him there, and was permitted
to remove to her father’s house, to remain there during his absence.
Captain Farmer joined his regiment, and had not been many days with it,
when, in a quarrel with his colonel, he drew his sword on the former,
and the result of this insane act (for such it was allowed to be) was,
that he was obliged to quit the service, being permitted to sell his
commission. The friends of Captain Farmer now prevailed on him to go
to India; she, however, refused to go with him, and remained at her
father’s.
Such is the account given to me by Lady Blessington, and for the
accuracy of the above report of it I can vouch.
R. R. MADDEN: ‘Literary Life and Correspondence of the Countess of
Blessington.’
* * * * *