A lady of the last century

by Dr. Doran

In the Robinson family, personal grace came naturally; but the mind was cultivated. Indeed, in that household, the wits were not allowed to rust. It was the delight of those bright girls and boys to maintain or to denounce, for the sport’s sake, some particular argument set up for the purpose. Occasionally the pleasant skirmish would develop into something like serious battle. The triumphant laugh of the victor would now and then bring tears to the eyes of the vanquished. At such times there was a moderator of the excited little assembly. The mother of the young disputants sat at a table close at hand. She read or worked; sometimes she listened smilingly, sometimes was not without apprehension. But she was equal to the emergency. Her children recognised her on such occasions as “Mrs. Speaker;” and that much-loved dignitary always adjourned the house when victory was too hotly contested, or when triumph seemed likely to be abused.

It is hard to believe that Elizabeth Robinson, who was the liveliest of these disputants, assumed or submitted to the drudgery of copying the whole of the Spectator, when she was only eight years of age. Her courage and perseverance, however, were equal to such a task; but her energies were often turned in another direction. She was as unreservedly given to dancing, she tells us, as if she had been bitten by a tarantula. She as ardently loved fun—“within the limits of becoming mirth”—as she devotedly pursued learning.

“My mind used to sleep,” she writes to Lord Lyttelton, “eight or ten hours without even the visitation of a dream, and rose in the morning, like Aurora, throwing freshness and joy on every object, tricked itself out in sunbeams, and set in gay and glowing colours.” With a head furnished with knowledge beyond that possessed by most girls of her age; with feet restless and impatient to join any dance anywhere; she had a heart most sisterly and tenderly attuned to love for, and sympathy with, her brothers. “I have seven of them,” she wrote, while she was yet in her teens, “and would not part with one for a kingdom. If I had but one, I should be distracted about him. Surely, no one has so many or so good brothers.” This is only one out of a score of such testimonies of sisterly affection.

There are some significant traces of the effects of this lady’s early training in the letters which she wrote from the time she was twelve years of age till she had reached her twenty-second year, when she married. These letters were addressed to a friend older than herself, Lady Margaret Cavendish Harley, who, in 1734, became Duchess of Portland. They are sprightly and forcible, but they are not “girlish.” In one of the earliest, written at Horton, near Hythe, Kent (one of the estates which Matthew gained by his marriage), she says: “My papa is a little vapoured, and last night, after two hours’ silence, he broke out into a great exclamation against the country, and concluded by saying, that living in the country was sleeping with one’s eyes open. He has ordered me to put a double quantity of saffron in his tea.” For what purpose this remedy was ordered, may be guessed from a passage in a comedy of Charles the Second’s time, by Howard. “Saffron-posset-drink is very good against the heaviness of the spirits,” says Mrs. Arbella, in “The Committee.”

Young Miss Robinson was fond of illustrating her early letters by images taken from life, and set up after the fashion of popular novelists. One of these figures occurs in a letter addressed to the Duchess of Portland, in May, 1734, when the lively writer had not yet completed her fourteenth year: “I am surprised that my answer to your Grace’s letter has never reached your hands. I sent it immediately to Canterbury, by the servant of a gentleman who dined here; and I suppose he forgot to put it in the post.... If my letter were sensible, what would be its mortification, that, instead of having the honour to kiss your Grace’s hands, it must live confined in the footman’s pocket, with greasy gloves, rotten apples, mouldy nuts, a pack of dirty cards, and the only companion of its sort—a tender epistle from his sweetheart, ‘tru till Deth;’ perhaps, by its situation, subject to be kicked by his master every morning, till at last, by ill-usage and rude company, worn too thin for any other use, it may make its exit by lighting a tobacco-pipe.”

The young writer of the above was not only remarkably observant of all that passed around her, but generally showed her reading by a quotation that should give force to the description of what she observed. Thus, in writing to her dear duchess, who had been suffering from fever (A. D. 1734), Miss Robinson remarks: “I shall put on as musty a face at your Grace’s fever as Miss W—— could make at the face of Doctor Sandys, to describe the horror of which would require at least as tragic a bard as Lee; for then she would look, good gods! how she would look!” This may smack of priggishness; but there was nothing of that, nor of false prudery, in Elizabeth Robinson’s character. Before she was fifteen, she had some experiences not likely to fall to the lot of young ladies of the present day. “I have in winter,” she writes to Mrs. Anstey, “gone eight miles to dance to the music of a blind fiddler, and returned at two o’clock in the morning, mightily pleased that I had been so well entertained.” Indeed, young ladies seem to have been thoroughly emancipated, and to have been abroad in the “wee sma’ hours ’ayont the twal,” enjoying all the perils consequent on such rather wild doings. In 1738, when our young lady was not quite eighteen, she went, with two of her brothers and her sister, eight miles to the play, from her Kentish home; and she tells the Duchess of Portland, “After the play, the gentlemen invited all the women to a supper at the inn, where we stayed till two o’clock in the morning, and then all set out for our respective homes.” The frolicsome damsel adds, “Before I had gone two miles, I had the pleasure of being overturned, at which I squalled for joy.” It was, perhaps, this indulgence in fun and late hours, joined to much solid reading, that made this youthful reveller and student hate early morning hours as she hated cards. But her “quality” was favourably shown in her ready observance of the law and custom of the house in which she happened to be a sojourner. There is no better proof than this of what is understood by “good breeding.” She would rather have gone down to breakfast at noon than at nine; but if the breakfast-hour of her entertainers was at eight, there was the young guest at table, fresh as the rose and brighter than the dawn. She amusingly illustrated this matter once, by writing from a house where she was tarrying, “Six o’clock in the morning; New Style.”

In fact, few things came amiss to her. No doubt she preferred Mary-le-bone Gardens to those at Edgeley or at Horton. She was happy in both, but happier in the fashionable gardens nearer London; for Mary-le-bone was still out of town. Elizabeth Robinson’s day is described, on one of these occasions, as breakfasting in Mary-le-bone Gardens at ten; giving a sitting to Zincke after midday, for her well-known miniature portrait as Anne Boleyn; and spending the evening at Vauxhall. At the nobility’s private balls given in the first-named suburban paradise, Elizabeth Robinson was amongst the gayest and fairest of the revellers. Before the dance began in those days the ladies’ fans were thrown upon a table, and the men then drew them for partners, each taking for his own the lady to whom the fan which he had drawn, and which he presented to her, belonged. It was not all breakfasting and dancing in those gardens. There was a large plunging-bath there, much used by fashionable Naiads, who rose from silken couches, donned a bathing-dress, took headers into the waters, gambolled in and under them till they were breathless, and then went home to dress for other enjoyments. When the Duchess of Portland heard of her young friend’s plunging delights, she expressed herself “frightened out of her wits.” But, on the other hand, Lord Dupplin wrote a couple of verses on this particular Naiad, and in honour of the poet, the laughing nymph again and again took headers into the glad waters of Mary-le-bone.

The home scenes of her life in the country come out strong in contrast with those of her life in London. In a lively sketch of one of these scenes, drawn for the duchess’s amusement, the youthful artist thus joyously describes herself and her doings:

“One common objection to the country is, one sees no faces but those of one’s own family; but my papa thinks he has found a remedy for that, by teaching me to draw; but then he husbands these faces in so cruel a manner, that he brings me sometimes a nose, sometimes an eye, at a time; but on the king’s birthday, as it was a festival, he brought me out a whole face, with its mouth wide open.” In another letter, she says: “I would advise you not to draw old men’s heads. It was the rueful countenance of Socrates or Seneca that first put me out of conceit with it. Had my papa given me the blooming faces of Adonis and Narcissus, I might have been a very apt scholar; and when I told him I found their great beards difficult to draw, he gave me St. John’s head in a charger. So, to avoid the speculation of dismal faces, which, by my art, I dismalised ten times more than they were before, I threw away my pencil. If I drew a group of little figures, I made their countenances so sad and their limbs so distorted, that from a set of laughing Cupids, they looked like the tormented infants in Herod’s cruelty, and smiling, became like Rachel weeping for her children.” After more in this strain, she calls herself the best hospital painter; “for I never drew a figure that was not lame or blind, and they had all something of the horrible in their countenances ... you would have thought they had seen their own faces in the glass.”

Her failure in the above respect at home found ample compensation in success at Tunbridge Wells, at Bath, and at country races, at all of which Elizabeth Robinson’s beauty attracted all eyes; her vivacious wit charmed or stung all ears. At these places, she studied life quite as much as she enjoyed its pleasures; and she could not go down a dance at the Wells or at “The Bath,” without making little mental epigrams on the looks of newly married people, the manners of lovers, and the doings of eccentric folk. These found their way, in writing, to her ducal friend, who had already bestowed on the restless maiden the nickname of “La Petite Fidget.”