Miss Eden's Letters. Eden Emily
many thanks, my Dearest, for your kind letter. We certainly do understand one another extraordinair well, as they say in Scotland. Your writing in London too is quite “from the depths I cried out.” Emily, there is a sympathy of bores between us. Sir Guy and I have regularly been put out of humour every morning by the new Times, and it will come all the way to Bute, though he has written to agents and bankers and offices to stop it. Like old Time and pleasant Time and Time-serving, there is no arresting it, and its disgusting pages meet my eye and try my temper without cessation. Send me down a little genuine essence of Whig when you have time occasionally. Sir Guy is no politician at all, only I in a quiet way insinuate sound principles into his mind. Not but what I think a military man should be without party, so that the doses I give are very mild. I go no further than just liberality, and now and then drawing him into some remarks on the malversations of ministers.
I enter into your dinner and house bothers.
I don’t find that variety in the beef of to-morrow and the mutton of to-day, which the Anti-Jacobin expatiates upon with such delight, and the joints diminish in sheep when we eat mutton. As for puddings, they are one and the same, and only one, and then when one has tortured one’s brain and produced a dinner, and that it is eaten, my heart sinks at the prospect that to-morrow will again require its meal, et les bras me tombent ….
Lord143 and Lady Bute are coming here. We don’t know them at all, but I suppose we shall see them, which is bore, for nothing is so tiresome as to be near neighbours with people one scarce knows. One has one foot in intimacy, and the other in formality, and it makes but a limping acquaintance. I don’t think Lady Lansdowne has quite got over my not marrying her way; she covers it up very well, but you know how soon you and I can see through all that, and I know also that Sir Guy is not likely to overcome that feeling in her. He is not a party man, he is not scientific, and unless he likes people he is very shy, and I see they will never make it up. But I always thought marriage must disarrange many acquaintances. I don’t regret acquaintances; even to have had variety of acquaintances is an advantage, for the reason which makes a public school an advantage to a boy; it widens the mind. But to go on through life with them is heartless and thankless too. I mean to save my time, and keep it all for those I like and love… We have lovely warm spring weather here, always breakfast with the window open and getting away from the fires. I must say the climate far exceeded my expectations. The garden is covered with thick white patches of snow-drops in full bloom. Don’t this make your mouth water, and your eyes too, you poor misery in your cold smoke?
Good-bye, Dearest, have you been drawing and what? I don’t mean just now in London, but in your lucid intervals, and are you well?
So far London is a place that cures or kills. Your own
Don’t go out during this pestilential month of March, people may call it east wind and sharp, but it is neither more or less than a plague, that regularly blows thro’ the Islands, and it is nonsense to brave it, just because it is not called pest, or yellow or scarlet, or pink fever, so don’t go out.
I am spending a few days here at Mount Stuart,144 and you may see that I am writing with strange paper and ink, and have but a distant bowing acquaintance with this fine clarified pen.
You are quite right, one is a better human creature, when one has seen a mountain and it does one good. I only wish I could see a mountain with you.
Your Feilding fuss is so described, that I laughed over it for an hour; my Dear, I see it, and enter into your quiescent feelings on the occasion; things settle themselves so well I wonder other people always, and we sometimes, give ourselves any trouble about anything.
This is a good enough house, but somehow they go out of the room and leave one, and yet one has not the comfort of feeling alone and easy, and I caught myself whispering and Lucy too; I can’t account for it, except by the great family pictures, that are listening all round in scarlet cloaks, and white shoes, and red heels and coronets. Kitty145 is to be married to-day – plenty of love but little prospect of anything else. Her future income is rather in the line of a midshipman’s allowance, Nothing a day and find yourself.
I hope you will taste this saying, for I am partial to it, it gives one a comfortable idea, that in these days, when the Whigs complain of Ministerial extravagance, the Navy establishment will escape censure.
Much to say I can’t pretend, but something to say I can always find when I write to you. We left Mount Stuart to-day. Sir Guy, Lucy and I delighted to be at home. Aunt rather missing the cookery dishes, claret, champagne, and a sound house.
My mind is grown much more easy since I have clearly ascertained, weighed, and measured that I don’t like Lord Bute, and of course I have a whole apparatus of reasonable reasons, to support my dislike envers et contre tout. He is proud not in that complimentary sense. Some people use the word implying a dislike of dirty deeds and a love of noble doings. He is not purse-proud nor personally proud of his looks; but the sheer genuine article pride which now-a-days one seldom meets with barefaced. He is proud of his ancestors, proud of the red puddle that runs in his veins, proud of being a Stuart, a Bute, and a Dumfries. He apes humility, and talks of the honour people do him in a way that sounds like “down on your knees.” Talks of his loyalty as if Kings should kiss his hand for it. However though this is tiresome and contemptible, he has some of the merits that mitigate pride. He seems high principled and honourable, with sense enough for his own steerage, and I make allowances for his blindness which must make him center in self a good deal.
She is pleasant enough in a middling way, no particular colour in her ideas. She never moots or shocks, or pushes one back, but she don’t go any further, content to dwell in decencies for ever. She likes a joke when it is published and printed for her, but I suppose a manuscript joke never occurred to her.
They never have anybody there, except now and then Mr. Moore, his man of business, who is in the full sense of the word corpulent, red-faced, with a short leg with a steel yard to it, and a false tuft; and he is Colonel of the Yeomanry. But I like him for a wonderful rare quality in any Baillie, but above all in a Scotch Baillie; he is independent and no toad-eater. He found fault with his patron’s potatoes at the grand table, with a whole row of silver plates dazing his eyne; and he as often as occasion occurs quietly contradicts him…
General Way146 and his wife are to be at Mount Stuart next week. Sir Guy described General Way as an Adjutant-General, and a Methodist, which sounds such an odd mixture, – true Church Militant. They are great Jew converters. I have been reading a luminous treatise on Witchcraft, seriously refuting such belief. One rather odd circumstance is, that three-and-twenty books and tracts have been written since Charles II.’s reign in earnest support of the doctrine of Sorcery and Witchcraft…
I go on writing in case you are still shut up, it may amuse you tho’ I have no event. An occasional mad dog spreads horror thro’ the district; no wonder I enter into the poor dog’s feelings, he belonged to the steam boat, and that was enough to send any Christian out of their senses, let alone a dog.
What a delightful letter, and I feel perfectly agonised, not an idea, not a topic, not a word to send you in return. Sir Guy says I may do as I please, so I shall send the Highlands to the right about, and go south to you as soon as the weather is travellable, and that we have seen Sir Guy’s old Scotch aunt147 at Edinburgh. I must see her because she is called “Aunt Christy.” That name, you must acknowledge, is worth a visit.
I send you, my Darling, a small Heart with my hair in it. Put it on directly and wear it. I know it is a comfort to have a little something new when one is ill, as I learnt when I had the chicken-pox, and found great benefit in some gilt gingerbread
Second Marquess of Bute, married, 1818, Maria, daughter of 3rd Earl of Guildford.
Lord Bute’s home.
Her maid.
Sir Gregory Way, Deputy Adjutant-General in N.B.
Miss Christina Campbell, aged seventy-five.