To cheer the lonely, grace the letter’d hour.
Somewhat too much of this.
The story continues in the same strain till long after the publication of Miss More’s Florio in 1786. It is only necessary to add that it is to Mrs. Boscawen that we owe the painting of Opie’s delightful portrait of Miss More.[290] It does more to perpetuate the charm of the bluestocking ladies than all their congratulatory epistles—in prose or verse.
Mrs. Ord[291] has by modern writers frequently been associated with Mrs. Montagu and Mrs. Vesey as originating the bluestocking conversazioni.[292] Just why Mrs. Ord should have been chosen to complete the triad of ladies it is difficult to say. She is not mentioned in Miss More’s Bas Bleu, in Dr. Burney’s verses, or in Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Her name occurs but once, and quite casually, in Walpole’s Letters; and Johnson writes but once[293] of having been present at her assembly. Even those who describe her parties speak rather of her guests than of herself, and praise her good nature without mentioning her conversation.[294] Her talk was, it appears, considered heavy, so that Miss Burney herself was obliged to admit that it lacked both mirth and instruction, and that she loved Mrs. Ord for her friendliness but not for her brilliancy.
Nevertheless Mrs. Ord was one who early made the experiment of banishing cards and dancing from her evening parties and substituting undisturbed conversation as the staple of her entertainment. Like Mrs. Vesey she abhorred formality, and made her guests draw their chairs about a large table in the middle of the room, remarking—and it is one of the few remarks of hers that has been preserved—that a table was the ‘best friend to sociable conversation.’[295] Here, apparently, she succeeded in getting the unity without the hard formality of the dreaded circle.[296]
She had, moreover, a skill in the choice of her guests which usually saved her from the charge of assembling crowds indiscriminately.[297] Pepys and Dr. Burney unite in praising her ability to mix her ingredients, and for this the latter pronounces her an excellent cook. Miss More liked her assemblies because there she could have Sir Joshua and Mr. Cambridge all to herself[298] or discuss the relative merits of Pope and Dryden, sitting apart with Mrs. Montagu and Horace Walpole.[299]
Perhaps Mrs. Ord wished to take the place of Mrs. Thrale as the social patron of Fanny Burney. She it was who conducted Fanny to her royal prison at Windsor,[300] who helped to keep her in touch with her old friends,[301] who showered gifts upon her and carried her to oratorios, and who, when the young woman was worn out by her servitude, put the map of England into the hands of ‘her child,’ and bade her choose the journey she would take. This trip, which was through south-west England, lasted many weeks, and it was mid-September before the two finally drove out of Bath towards London in Mrs. Ord’s coach-and-four.[302] Nor did the services of this ‘excellent and maternal’ creature stop with this, for the very next year she carried Miss Burney to the ‘salubrious hills of Norbury,’ and there administered what the Diarist, in a flight of rhetoric worthy of her latest years, called ‘the balsamic medicine of social tenderness.’[303] But nothing came of this patronage in the way of literature, so that Mrs. Ord’s kindness, though challenging our admiration, adds little to the movement we are tracing.
Another woman closely associated with Miss Burney, and one who profoundly influenced her life, was that venerable relic of the former age, Mary Granville Delany, whom Burke called ‘not only the woman of fashion of the present age, but ... the highest bred woman in the world.’[304] ‘Swift’s Mrs. Delany,’ they loved to call her, for she had known the great Dean in his latter days. Of the relationship, such as it was, she never tired of talking, and in this she was wise, for it was her chief claim to distinction in literary circles. The woman who could display a sheaf of private letters from Swift and to whom the Spectator was ‘almost too modern to speak of’[305] was of course worshipped by every bluestocking in London; but she was never quite a blue herself. She did not wish to be. Miss More, it is true, claims her as one of the circle in her poem Sensibility: