There are many ways of asking a favour; but to assume that you are granting the favour that you ask shows spirit and invention. Had Mrs. Chapone written nothing but this model of all begging letters, she would be worthy to take high rank among the literary ladies of Great Britain.
It is more difficult to establish the claim of Mrs. Boscawen, who looms nebulously on the horizon as the wife of an admiral, and the friend of Miss Hannah More, from whom she received flowing compliments in the “Bas Bleu.”
Each art of conversation knowing,
High-bred, elegant Boscawen.
We are told that this lady was “distinguished by the strength of her understanding, the poignancy of her humour, and the brilliancy of her wit”; but there does not survive the mildest joke, the smallest word of wisdom to illustrate these qualities. Then there was Mrs. Schimmelpenninck, whose name alone was a guarantee of immortality; and the “sprightly and pleasing Mrs. Ironmonger”; and Miss Lee, who could repeat the whole of Miss Burney’s “Cecilia” (a shocking accomplishment); and the vivacious Miss Monckton, whom Johnson called a dunce; and Miss Elizabeth Hamilton, a useful person, “equally competent to form the minds and manners of the daughters of a nobleman, and to reform the simple but idle habits of the peasantry”; and Mrs. Bennet, whose letters—so Miss Seward tells us—“breathed Ciceronean spirit and eloquence,” and whose poems revealed “the terse neatness, humour, and gayety of Swift,” which makes it doubly distressful that neither letters nor poems have survived. Above all, there was the mysterious “Sylph,” who glides—sylphlike—through a misty atmosphere of conjecture and adulation; and about whom we feel some of the fond solicitude expressed over and over again by the letter-writers of this engaging period.
Translated into prose, the Sylph becomes Mrs. Agmondesham Vesey,—
Vesey, of verse the judge and friend,—
a fatuous deaf lady, with a taste for literary society, and a talent for arranging chairs. She it was who first gathered the “Blues” together, placing them in little groups—generally back to back—and flitting so rapidly from one group to another, her ear-trumpet hung around her neck, that she never heard more than a few broken sentences of conversation. She had what Miss Hannah More amiably called “plastic genius,” which meant that she fidgeted perpetually; and what Miss Carter termed “a delightful spirit of innocent irregularity,” which meant that she was inconsequent to the danger point. “She united,” said Madame d’Arblay, “the unguardedness of childhood to a Hibernian bewilderment of ideas which cast her incessantly into some burlesque situation.” But her kind-heartedness (she proposed having her drawing-room gravelled, so that a lame friend could walk on it without slipping) made even her absurdities lovable, and her most fantastic behaviour was tolerated as proof of her aerial essence. “There is nothing of mere vulgar mortality about our Sylph,” wrote Miss Carter proudly.
It was in accordance with this pleasing illusion that, when Mrs. Vesey took a sea voyage, her friends spoke of her as though she were a mermaid, disporting herself in, instead of on, the ocean. They not only held “the uproar of a stormy sea to be as well adapted to the sublime of her imagination as the soft murmur of a gliding stream to the gentleness of her temper” (so much might at a pinch be said about any of us); but we find Miss Carter writing to Mrs. Montagu in this perplexing strain:—
“I fancy our Sylph has not yet left the coral groves and submarine palaces in which she would meet with so many of her fellow nymphs on her way to England. I think if she had landed, we should have had some information about it, either from herself or from somebody else who knows her consequence to us.”