Miss Eden's Letters. Eden Emily
to Paris, and like everybody else, is expecting you and me to pay him a good long visit at the end of the year. In his mild rational way he exceedingly regrets that the Cortes have not cut off the head of Ferdinand.173
MY DARLING EM, Your letter has revived me, for I was smothered with Fog and so obfuscated I found myself growing callous of the density of the gloom, and my perception of my own dirt and my neighbour’s grimness was diminishing. I was getting hardened, when your letter and a gleam of dingy yellow sun showed me the state of myself and the children, and I went up and washed myself and repented of my filth. The fog prevented Mrs. Colvile coming, which is provoking. I wanted to show her my boy; she has put so many of them together, she has an experienced eye on the subject174…
The Ladies Fitz-Patrick, old Mrs. Smith, etc., are cooking up a match between Vernon Smith and Mary Wilson, old Lord Ossory’s natural daughter with much money.
Emily does it strike you that vices are wonderfully prolific among the Whigs? There are such countless illegitimates among them, such a tribe of Children of the Mist… Your own
Twelfth Night or what you will.
MY DARLING EMMY, Thank God you have written at last, I have worked myself into a fright this day or two that you were very ill. I have been very poorly, but am better. You are mistaken about that sucking lump being a favourite. I esteem him; he is a man of strict probity and integrity with steady principles, and he is a man would make any reasonable woman very happy in domestic life; but there is a refinement and charm in that Cain that makes a fool of me, – a great fool, for she175 don’t much care for me, and is radically vicious.
We have got a house between Reading and Basingstoke, a mile from Strathfieldsaye, at a village called Strathfield Turgess: – delightful prospect, well furnished, roomy, with Cow and poultry included, garden meadow, for £84 per annum.
Lady Louisa Lennox had rather taken my fancy, and that negative mind of being Anti-Bathurst is a jewel in their favour. Emily, to have it gravely told me Lady Georgina Bathurst176 is a strong-headed woman, superior, with wonderful abilities, etc. Cela m’irrite la bile, when I know her to be prejudiced, worldly, entrenched by prejudices upon prejudice, till her very soul is straightened within the narrow limit of the Ministers, their wives, and her own family…
How is your Grantham? My Lansdowne is playing at de petits jeux innocents. I am of a guilty inclination and cannot taste those social innocences, besides, Emmy, we don’t do such things well in England, it don’t suit well, and to fail in a triviality is failure indeed, but the Wilt loves a caper. All this is very well, but I want to talk to you, Emmy. I have such quantities I cannot even tap in a letter, that I could talk out just in one ½ hour.
Louisa Napier177 is with Lady Londonderry,178 and the account I think very horrid. Every thing at Cray goes on the same, conversation, laughing, novels, light books, the attaches and habitués coming in, the very red boxes of office left in their places, not a shade of difference in her occupations, amusements or mode of life.
She seems as if determined there shall be no change. This may be fortitude, to me it is frightful. That habits should be so cherished and so rooted as to withstand such a shock as the disappearance of the only object she is ever supposed to have loved by Death, and such a death, is wonderful, and not to be understood if it is upon principles so erroneous…
I dined with the Wellesleys yesterday. Mr. Wellesley179 acknowledges having been distractedly in love with Sister, and was so pleased to see her at Hastings. He hopes you like the place. His son Arthur is such a cub, and thinks himself so very every thing, it made me quite low. Of the Wellesley girls, the top and bottom dish, or eldest and youngest, are of the specie Geese – the middle ones, Georgina180 and Mary,181 are quite delightful, and very uncommon in their way.
Thank you for your last letter, thank you for Lord Lansdowne’s after laugh, but thank you above all, for being still my own Emmy just the same as ever. I suppose you are going to Captain Parry’s182 fête on board the Hecla, announced in the newspaper. I think he might have asked me, and then I could have got over his ordering all this snow from Gunter’s. However I think he has rather overdone it. I understand there is to be a whole course of Walrus.
I had a letter from Sister, written at Lady Sarah’s183 the day she left Strathfieldsaye. She is full of good, and agreeable; but yet, I never should be able to be quite friends with her. There is some gall about her which would always give me an afterthought, and keep me perhaps more on my guard with her than with many others who might betray me faster.
I wish you could have seen us all, we were so ill-sorted. As for poor Sister, among three Eton boys, one Oxford merveilleux, 2 silent girls, 1 military clergyman, 2 Colonels, some dancing country neighbours all wound up and going, I don’t know how she survives. By the bye tell me what are a Mr. Adderley and a Miss Adderley184 to her? Something? Lord Buckinghamshire’s legitimates by a former marriage, or Sister’s illegitimates, or both their children, or no children at all? I was asked and could not tell. Don’t racket yourself to death. I, who no longer sit at good men’s feasts, certainly may magnify the fatigue, but I am sure you do too much.
May, 1824. – There is some saying, Chinese I believe, about not letting grass grow between friends, or words to that effect. Now, you must allow I have mowed it twice, but you will not keep it down, and if you will not, what’s to be done?
Lucy is coming to me to-morrow in spite of her resolutions never to be with me during a groaning. Mrs. Napier, too, who is staying at Farm House with her husband and a few children, wishes much to be with me, and it will, I know, end in my running away into some Barn, like a Cat, to kitten in peace. No, my dear Emmy, you are the only person that can be agreeable to me even in a lying-in —c’est tout dire.
Lucy tells me she saw dear Robert,185 greatly to her satisfaction, one stray day she spent in London. So odd! for in general those are the particular days one can look out no face one ever saw before, unless one happens to be ill-dressed or in any disgraceful predicament of Hackney coach or bad company… But strange to say, Lucy met Robert with decency and without distress. She says he is just the same, only sunburnt. How I wish I could see him, if he has any houses of low price and good dimensions, and furnished suited to a genteel but indigent or indignant Family? There is a talk of our leaving this, as the Landlord wishes to live here himself, and I should like to belong to Robert’s flock, of being one of his Ouailles.
DEAREST EMMY, I was quite sorry I had sent my letter when the day after I found I was at liberty to talk about William de Roos’s marriage.186 I am all delighted, and all that, and all I should be when I see him so happy. But tho’ I have been going thro’ all the palliating influence of confidant and in his secret, and within the mark of all hopes, and fears, and difficulties, yet I cannot shake off the idea that she is not good enough, he is selon moi such a dear creature, so much beyond the common run of man, of young men. Of course I rely on your keeping this alongside with your own ideas on the subject.
I believe she is improved, and I liked her once, when first she came out, and you know we
Ferdinand VII. of Spain.
Mrs. Colvile had seventeen children.
Her daughter Pamela.
Daughter of Henry, 3rd Earl Bathurst.
Daughter of the Hon. George Napier.
Lady Emily Hobart, married in 1794 Viscount Castlereagh. He committed suicide, August 12, 1822, at his house, North Cray, in Kent.
Hon. and Rev. Gerald Wellesley, Prebendary of Durham, brother of 1st Duke of Wellington.
Georgina married in 1827 Rev. G. Darby St. Quintin.
Mary married in 1836 Henry, 4th Earl Cadogan.
Sir William Parry, the Arctic explorer.
Lady Sarah Robinson (Lady Goderich).
Children of Thomas Adderley; his widow married Lord Hobart in 1792. They had one daughter, Sarah, who married Mr. Robinson. Lady Hobart died in 1796. Lord Hobart married secondly Eleanor Eden, in 1799, and became Earl of Buckinghamshire in 1804.
Miss Eden’s brother, Rector of Eyam in Derbyshire.
Hon. William de Roos married, June 7, Lady Georgina Lennox.