222 LADY HESTER STANHOPE. HAT must surely be an extraordinary woman who, born THAT in the purple of the British aristocracy, and, before she was twenty, a personage of influence in the highest region of political power, deliberately, and whilst yet in the heyday of life, cast away the advantages of her social position to herd with the nomadic tribes of Asian deserts, for whom she neither felt nor affected either liking or esteem, and who, uninspired by genuine religious or political enthusiasm, dreamt vaguely, and died dreaming, of a sacerdotal empire in the East-of a throne in Jerusalem! Was, then, the self-expatriation of the Lady Hester Stanhope, as her French admirers generally assert, the natural revolt of a sensitive and ardent nature against the life of paltry conventionalism and mean compliances into which she had been too early initiated?—or was it, as others insist with greater plausibility, the petulant outbreak of a vain, atrabilious woman, whose insane craving after applause and notoriety could, she well knew, only be gratified in countries where her pension of fifteen hundred pounds sterling per annum—against which her sensitive and ardent nature did not revolt-would be a princely revenue, and the shallowest acquirements, in a European sense, pass for profoundest knowledge? The record of Lady Hester Stanhope's early life will, if read and interpreted aright, determine which of these two opposite assumptions is the true one; and we place it, there fore, before the reader without further preliminary com ment. Lady Hester Stanhope was the eldest of three daughters— Hester, Griselda, and Lucy-borne to Charles, Earl Stanhope, by his first wife, the sister of William Pitt, and daughter, consequently, of the first Earl of Chatham. Charles, Earl Stanhope, made some noise in his day, chiefly forasmuch that, being himself a hereditary Peer, he felt or affected a horror of hereditary rank, sympathized openly with the French Revolution, and gave such proof of the sincerity of his opinions as the erasure of armorial bearings from his plate and coach-panels might afford :—a whimsical gentleman in other respects, according to Lady Hester, who reports, that he slept without a nightcap under the weight of twelve blankets, and when he rose in the morning, slipped on a pair of silk breeches, and squatting down upon some part of the room where there was no carpet, ate his breakfast of tea and dry bread! His lordship, moreover, not content, when in a more inflamed state of republicanism than usual, with having painted out the armorial insignia from his carriage-panels, sold the carriages, to the great chagrin of the second Lady Stanhope, whose distress suggested to little Lady Hester a suitable plan for her relief. The child procured a pair of stilts, and stumped down a dirty lane where the Earl would be sure to see her. It so fell out, and his Lordship accosted her with, "I say, little girl, what have you been doing? Where was it I saw you going upon a pair of the-the devil knows what, eh, little girl?" To which the little girl replied, that as papa had sold his carriages and horses, it occurred to her that she might as well practise getting through the mud upon stilts; but that poor Lady Stanhope, who could not avail herself of such expedients, felt the loss of her carriage acutely. Lady Hester's remonstrance had the hoped-for effect upon the peer-philosopher, who promised to restore the carriage, "but no more armorial bearings." This particular craze of the noble Earl was not hereditary in the family; the Lady Hester Stanhope glorifying herself to her dying day upon being an aristocrat, pur sang, as incontrovertibly "shown by the formation of my instep, which is so high that a kitten can walk under the sole of my foot." Thus much in relation to Lady Hester's father, and the light which his peculiar idiosyncrasy projects over his daughter's. Her mother died early, and the second Lady Stanhope, a Grenville, could have had no influence over the education, such as it was, of her step-daughters; her ladyship's time, from the forenoon when she rose till the dawn of the following day, being wholly occupied in having her hair dressed by one of the only two men (Frenchmen) that were equal to the task-by dinner, the opera, and night-parties. The young ladies' grandmother, the Dowager Lady Stanhope, who resided at Chevening, was an eccentricity of a statelier sort than her son. An immitigable formality regulated all things at Chevening, from the unheeled shoes and cropped heads of the women, and dress and demeanour of the men servants-attired like gentlemen-ushers-to the daily squeezing of the Ladies Hester, Griselda, and Lucy into shape and straightness by back-boards; the rigid régime of the inexorable Dowager being enforced by a formidable array of scissors and rods; the scissors, to clip off any stray curl that should dare peep out from under a maid's cap; the rods, for general application, alike to granddaughters, and, considered as clothes-pegs, grander servants. "How I did hate our French and Swiss governesses!" exclaimed the Lady Hester, half a century afterwards, whilst in daily expectation of the Millennium, and en attendant painting herself en beau, to the much-enduring medical gentleman who has since published his recollections of those charming colloquies in six closely-printed volumes. "How I did hate those French and Swiss governesses; they would have squeezed me, had it been possible to do so, into the size of a tiny Miss;"-and-inconceivable audacity of plebeian ignorance! -positively endeavoured to flatten down the sole of her ladyship's foot, which a kitten could walk under, "though that was one of the things which showed my high breeding." M. Lamartine, it may be here mentioned, was apprised by her ladyship, when he visited her at Dar Jöon, in Syria, that he, too, by the same sign, was high-bred; or, at all events, approximated towards that exalted conditionsay half or two-thirds bred-forasmuch that, albeit a kitten might not be able to find its way under his foot, water could, without wetting the sole thereof. It is probable that her ladyship's magnificent contempt for the people of England was based upon the fact that, as a nation, we are defective in the pedal arch,-a comparatively even-soled race, from which no good could possibly arise. The education, in a book sense, of the Ladies Stanhope appears to have been wofully neglected or thrown away; it having been one of Lady Hester's boasts, that she had never read more than the first three or four pages of any book, and that her especial aversion was "History;" which-from the spontaneous illumination of her star, I suppose-she knew to be all lies. Not that her ladyship held all human testimony to be untrustworthy; not, for example, when it set forth her own claims to the admiration and esteem of mankind; for every word or line of which personal history she had a high respect and tenacious memory. "Men who were no fools" had declared that she might well be proud of the alabaster whiteness of her neck, rivalling that of her pearl necklace ;—of her cheek's fine contour, rounding off so beautifully that Beau Brummel once exclaimed,—“ For God's sake, take off those ear-rings, that we may see what is beneath them;" and when, tanned, shrivelled, shrunken with age, the Syrian climate, and tobacco-smoke, her ladyship would repeat the words of Sir Sidney Smith's description of her first appearance on the world's great (upper) stage: "You entered the room in your pale skirt, exciting our admiration by your magnificent and majestic figure. The roses and lilies were blended in your face, and the ineffable smiles of your countenance diffused happiness around you." At the same time the Lady Hester, it must be understood, did not -we have her own authority for saying-plume herself at all upon the possession of such transcendent charms and graces; albeit that, like the country she contemned and had cast off, the admiring terms in which they had been spoken of would cling to her memory, and find their frequent way unbidden to her lips. Indeed, she rather thought that her sister Lucy was "the prettiest" of the family; though certainly not gifted with the high qualities possessed in such perfection by herself as to call forth and justify George III.'s elaborate compliment, addressed to her uncle, Mr. Pitt, and carefully retained in that elastic memory of hers, side by side with ineffable spirit-teachings: "You have not reason, Mr. Pitt, to be proud that you are a Minister, for there have been many before and will be many after you; but you have reason to be proud of your niece, Lady Hester, who unites everything that is good and great in man and woman.' The candour of Lady Hester slightly subdues the brilliancy of this |