London, June 14, 1834.—A German improvisatore named Langsward has been recommended to me by Madame de Dolomieu. I had to gather together in his honour all the people here (few enough) who know a little German. The entertainment was not bad. There were bouts rimés, which he filled up very creditably; some verses about Inez de Castro; and, later on, a prose piece—a scene of lower-class Viennese life—which showed real verve and talent. The talent for poetic improvisation almost always indicates faculties of an unusual order. This is the case even with Southern people, whose language is naturally very harmonious. Poetic inspiration is a proportionately greater achievement in the less flexible accents of Northern countries. Still improvisatori, even Sgricci, have always seemed to me more or less frigid or more or less absurd. Their enthusiasm is overdone and false; the close rooms in which they are confined inspire neither the poet nor his audience. Nothing in them or their surroundings is in the key of poetry. I think that if you are to produce an enthusiasm which will really gain every one you must have a landscape for your stage, the sun to light you, a rock for seat, a lyre for accompaniment, for your subject great and immediate events, and a whole nation for audience. Corinna if you like, Homer above all! But a gentleman in a dress-coat in a little London drawing-room, posturing before a few women who are trying to get away to a ball, and a few men, of whom half are thinking of the Belgian protocols and the other half of Ascot races, can never be more than a trifling little rhyming doll who is tedious and quite out of place.
Madame de Lieven showed me yesterday a letter from M. de Nesselrode, in which he complains of the ill-will and the troublesome, teasing manner of Lord Ponsonby, who, he adds, is goading the poor Divan to fury. Admiral Roussin appears charming by comparison.
Dom Miguel has really embarked, and is going to Genoa.
London, June 15, 1834.—Dom Pedro is hardly relieved of his brother's presence and free of the supervision of the Cortes, and he has already begun to destroy convents, monks, and nuns. I do not know whether this, too, will excite admiration at Holland House, but to me it seems a piece of impious folly which may well bring speedy repentance in its train.
The Rothschilds, who are by way of knowing everything, have been to M. de Talleyrand to say that the Marquis de Miraflorés has just left for Portsmouth to take money to Don Carlos on condition of his signing guarantees similar to those given by Dom Miguel.
M. Bignon, the day he dined at Lord Palmerston's, when M. de Talleyrand was there, said to the latter that he wished to have a word with him, and with a mysterious and confidential air, added: "Now that I have dined with Lord Palmerston they can no longer say at Paris that I can't be Minister." This curious piece of reasoning was followed by a series of indiscreet criticisms of the French Cabinet and expressions of surprise that overtures of the same kind had not been made to M. de Talleyrand by M. Dupin. Nothing assuredly can be more presumptuous than this spirit, whether it takes the supple and cringing form of M. Bignon or the didactic and crude shape of M. Dupin.
London, June 16, 1834.—A propos of M. Dupin, when his mother died some time ago, at Clamecy en Nivernais, he had cut on her tomb, "Here lies the mother of the three Dupins."
There are some good stories here of him and the amiable Piron, his cicerone. Mr. Ellice one day took them both to see some sight or other in London. In the carriage M. Dupin unfolded a large-checked pocket handkerchief, very vulgar in design, and holding it some distance from his face, spat into it, aiming very precisely at the middle of the handkerchief. On this M. Piron said to him aloud, with a very knowing air, "Sir, in this country one does not spit in public."
The choice of Mr. Fergusson for a high legal appointment gives an even more Radical tinge to the English Cabinet. Lord Grey, almost without knowing it, has thus been dragged to the verge of an abyss, into which his weakness is thrusting him, but from which all his instincts and natural tendencies hold him back. Lord Brougham boasts that he has set everything right; Lord Durham, on the contrary, says (no doubt in order to prepare the way for himself) that it is he alone who has persuaded all the new recruits to join. Meanwhile he has retired to his villa near London, whence he declares, "I have made Kings and refused to be one myself."
The Marquis of Conyngham is, they say, to go to the Post Office and not to have a seat in the Cabinet. His selection is a social matter, with which politics, it appears, have very little to do.