who was there in the character of a humble friend; some stranger or other; the Wordsworths, and myself. The dinner was the very humblest and simplest I had ever seen -in that there was nothing to offend-I did not then know that the lady was very rich-but also it was flagrantly insufficient in quantity. Dinner, however, proceeded; when, without any removals, in came a kind of second course, in the shape of a solitary pheasant. This, in a cold manner, she asked me to try; but we, in our humility, declined for the present; and also in mere good-nature, not wishing to expose too palpably the insufficiency of her dinner. May I die the death of a traitor, if she did not proceed, without further question to any one of us (and, as to the poor young companion, no form of even invitation was conceded to her), and, in the eyes of us all, eat up the whole bird, from alpha to omega. Upon my honour, I thought to myself, this is a scene I would not have missed. It is well to know the possibilities of human nature. Could she have a bet depending on the issue, and would she explain all to us as soon as she had won her wager? Alas! no explanation ever came, except, indeed, that afterwards her character, put en evidence upon a score of occasions, too satisfactorily explained everything. No; it was, as Mr. Coleridge expresses it, a psychological curiosity—a hollow thing—and only once matched in all the course of my reading, in or out of romances; but that once, I grieve to say it, was by a king, and a sort of hero. The Duchess of Marlborough it is who reports the shocking anecdote of William III, that actually Princess Anne, his future wife, durst not take any of the green peas brought to the dinner table, when that vegetable happened to be as yet scarce and premature. There was a gentleman! And such a lady had we for our hostess. However, we all observed a suitable gravity; but afterwards, when we left the house, the remembrance affected us differently. Miss Wordsworth laughed with undissembled glee; but Wordsworth thought it too grave a matter for laughing-he was thoroughly disgusted, and said repeatedly, "A person cannot be honest, positively not honest, who is capable of such an act." The lady is dead, and I shall not mention her name: she lived only to gratify her selfish propensities; and two little anecdotes may show the outrageous character of her meanness. I was now on the debtor side of her dinner account, and, therefore, in a future year she readily accepted an invitation to come and dine with me at my cottage. But, on a subsequent occasion, when I was to have a few literary people at dinner, whom I knew that she greatly wished to meet, she positively replied thus:-"No; I have already come with my young lady to dine with you; that puts me on the wrong side by one; now, if I were to come again, as I cannot leave Miss behind, I shall then be on the wrong side by three; and that is more than I could find opportunities to repay before I go up to London for the winter." "Very well," I said; "give me 3s. and that will settle the account." She laughed, but positively persisted in not coming until after dinner, notwithstanding she had to drive a distance of ten miles. The other anecdote is worse. She was exceedingly careful of her health; and not thinking it healthy to drive about in a close carriage,—which, besides, could not have suited the narrow mountain tracks, to which her sketching habits attracted her, she shut up her town carriage for the summer, and jobbed some little open car. Being a very large woman, and, moreover, a masculine woman, with a bronzed complexion, and always choosing to wear, at night, a turban, round hair that was as black as that of the "Moors of Malabar," she presented an exact likeness of a Saracen's Head, as painted over inn-doors; whilst the timid and delicate young lady by her side looked like " dejected Pity" at the side of "Revenge" when assuming the war-denouncing trumpet. Some Oxonians and Cantabs, who, at different times, were in the habit of meeting this oddly assorted party in all nooks of the country, used to move the question, whether the poor horse or the young lady had the worst of it? At length the matter was decided: the horse was fast going off this sublunary stage; and the Saracen's Head was told as much, and with this little addition, that his death was owing inter alia to starvation. Her answer was remarkable :"But, my dear madam, that is his master's fault; I pay so much a-day—he is to keep the horse." That might be, but still the horse was dying, and dying in the way stated. The Saracen's Head persisted in using him under those circumstances such was her "bond "-and in a short time the horse actually died. Yes, the horse died- and died of starvation—or at least of an illness caused originally by starvation for so said, not merely the whole population of the little neighbouring town, but also the surgeon. Not long after, however, the lady, the Saracen's Head, died herself; but I fear not of starvation; for, though something like it did prevail at her table, she prudently reserved it all for her guests; in fact, I never heard of such vigilant care, and so much laudable exertion, applied to the promotion of health yet all failed, and, in a degree which confounded people's speculations upon the subject-for she did not live much beyond sixty; whereas everybody supposed that the management of her physical system entitled her to outwear a century. Perhaps the prayers of horses might avail to order it otherwise. But the singular thing about this lady's mixed and contradictory character was, that in London and Bath, where her peculiar habits of life were naturally less accurately known, she maintained the reputation of one who united the accomplishments of literature and art with a remarkable depth of sensibility, and a most amiable readiness to enter into the distresses of her friends by sympathy the most cordial and consolation the most delicate. More than once I have seen her name recorded in printed books, and attended with praises that tended to this effect. I have seen letters also from a lady in deep affliction which spoke of the Saracen's Head as having paid her the first visit from which she drew any effectual consolation. Such are the erroneous impressions conveyed by biographical memoirs; or, which is a more charitable construction of the case, such are the inconsistencies of the human heart! And certainly there was one fact, even in her Westmoreland life, that did lend some countenance to the southern picture of her amiableness: and this lay in the cheerfulness with which she gave up her time (time, but not much of her redundant money) to the promotion of the charitable schemes set on foot by the neighbouring ladies; sometimes for the education of poor children, sometimes for the visiting of the sick, &c., &c. I have heard several of those ladies express their gratitude for her exertions, and declare that she was about their best member. But their horror was undisguised when the weekly committee came, by rotation, to hold its sittings at her little villa; for, as the business occupied them frequently from eleven o'clock in the forenoon to a late dinner hour, and as many of them had a fifteen or twenty miles' drive, they needed some refreshments: but these were, of course, a 66 great idea" at the Saracen's Head; since, according to the epigram which illustrates the maxim of Tacitus that omne ignotum pro magnifico, and, applying it to the case of a miser's horse, terminates by saying, "What vast ideas must he have of oats!". upon the same principle these poor ladies, on those fatal committee days, never failed to form most exaggerated ideas of bread, butter, and wine. And at length some, more intrepid than the rest, began to carry biscuits in their muffs, and, with the conscious tremors of school girls (profiting by the absence of the mistress but momentarily expecting detection), they employed some casual absence of their unhostly hostess in distributing and eating their hidden "viaticum." However, it must be acknowledged, that time and exertion, and the sacrifice of more selfish pleasure during the penance at the school, were, after all, real indications of kindness to her fellow-creatures; and, as I wish to part in peace even with the Saracen's Head, I have reserved this anecdote to the last for it is painful to have lived on terms of good nature, and exchanging civilities, with any human being of whom one can report absolutely no good thing; and I sympathize heartily with that indulgent person of whom it is somewhere recorded that, upon an occasion when the death of a man happened to be mentioned who was unanimously pronounced a wretch without one good quality, "monstrum nullâ virtute redemptum," he ventured, however, at last, in a deprecatory tone to say-" Well, he did whistle beautifully, at any rate." Talking of "whistling" reminds me to return from my digression; for on that night, the 12th of November, 1807, and the last of my visits to the Wordsworths, I took leave of them in the inn at Ambleside about ten at night; and the post-chaise in which I crossed the country to catch the mail was driven by a postilion who whistled so delightfully that, for the first time in my life, I became aware of the prodigious powers which are lodged potentially in so despised a function of the vocal organs. For the whole of the long ascent up Orrest Head, which obliged him to walk his horses for a full half-mile, he made the woods of Windermere ring with the canorous sweetness of his half flute, half clarionet music; but, in fact, the subtle melody of the effect placed it in power far beyond either flute or clarionet. A year or two afterwards, I heard a fellow-servant of this same postilion's, a black, play with equal superiority of effect upon the jew's harp; making that, which in most hands is a mere monotonous jarring, a dull reverberating vibration, into a delightful lyre of no inconsiderable compass. We have since heard of, some of us have heard, the chinchopper. Within the last hundred years, we have had the Æolian harp (first mentioned and described in the "Castle of Indolence," which I think was first published entire about 17381); then the musical glasses; then the celestina, to represent the music of the spheres, introduced by Mr. Walker, or some other lecturing astronomer; and many another fine effect obtained from trivial means. But, at this moment, I recollect a performance perhaps more astonishing than any of them. A Mr. Worgman, who had very good introductions, and very general ones (for he was to be met within a few months in every part of the island), used to accompany himself on the piano, weaving extempore long tissues of impassioned music, that were called his own, but which, in fact, were all the better 1 The Castle of Indolence was first published in 1748, the year of the poet's death. The following is the stanza of the poem referred to by De Quincey : "A certain music, never known before, Here lull'd the pensive, melancholy mind; But sidelong to the gently-waving wind To lay the well-tuned instrument reclined, From which, with airy flying fingers light, Whence, with just cause, the Harp of Æolus it hight."-M. VOL. II 2 A |