PARK LODGE, GREENWICH,
Wednesday [end of November 1830].
DEAREST THERESA, I shall take it as a great compliment being asked to dinner anywhere by anybody, but as a matter of choice I should prefer dining with the Lord Mayor habitually—not from any gourmandise, I beg to mention, for in my days I never saw such uneatable food. The soup had been saved, I imagine, from the day that the King did not dine at the Guildhall, and consequently a little salt had been thrown in every day just to preserve it. The preservation had been effected, but how many pounds of salt had been used it is difficult to guess. Nobody offered me anything else but a slice of half-cold peacock, whose tail feathers were still spread and growing. However, though as mere dinner it was a failure, the flow of soul was prodigious. We were so unanimous, so fond of each other. Dear Don Key[360] himself in such spirits, and Mrs. Key and all the small bunch of Keys so polite and attentive. “What curious creatures we are,” as that old Machy in Destiny[361] (have you read it?) keeps observing; and all the forms of civic life are more curious than the rest. The Lady Mayoress receives all her guests without stirring from her chair, though it is obvious from her old habit of attending to her shop that she is dying to get up to serve them all. The Lord Mayor walks in to dinner before all his visitors, leaving the Duke of Sussex,[362] etc., to take care of themselves, and then he and his wife sit by each other without the relief of a third person. Their domestic felicity has, I fear, received a check for life, because every time Key got up to speak his sword hitched in his wife’s blonde, which, of course, was very unpleasant. It made the blonde all fuzzy. However, he is a good Lord Mayor, and so polite to His Majesty’s Ministers that they were some of them in agonies of fright he was going to propose all their healths individually, and it was only prevented by Lord Grey’s[363] getting up from dinner before one-third of the toasts had been given. That sort of audience is very alarming, I believe. Lord Grey said he never felt so frightened in his life, and Lord Lansdowne, whom I sat next to, told me that if his health came next, he had not an idea what was to be done. He felt sure he could not say a word. I quite understood it. An audience of ladies whom they all knew well, and who were all likely to laugh, besides 500 other people all staring at them as a show, must be rather trying.
It was great fun to see the Chancellor looking demure and shy while he was loué vif by the Lord Mayor. He is very amusing with his popularity. Of course we were rather late at the Mansion House. The Chancellor always is five minutes too late everywhere. However, we arrived in solitary grandeur after all the other carriages had gone away, and were received with unbounded applause by the mob. I wonder which of us they meant to approve of. I am disappointed in the magnificence of the city. The whole set-out is mesquin to the greatest degree. Nothing but common blue plates and only one silver fork apiece, which those who were learned in public dinners carefully preserved. I lost mine in the first five minutes. The city ladies are so ill-dressed too; such old gowns with black shoes, etc. I went back to Grosvenor Street at eleven, moulted my feathers and changed my gown, and got home at twelve.
George had a holiday yesterday, and worked in the garden from breakfast till dinner. You have no idea what a good collection of plants we are making. We quarrel very much about the places in which they are to be put, and pass the evenings in tart innuendoes about my Eccremocarpus which you liked, and my Ipomaea seed which you sowed, and which has never come up. But the general result is great amusement.
I do not think four horses will be able to drag me back to town; I like this so much better. Your brother George wrote me word he had the gout. Ever your affectionate
E. E.
Miss Eden to Mrs. Lister.
GROSVENOR STREET,
Monday [November 1830].
MY DEAREST THERESA, I was not at all in the mood to write, and was almost glad you did not write to me because of that dreadful bore of an answer which you would expect; and I have been so very ill! Besides that, I have been a fortnight at Eastcombe tête-à-tête with Sister, and forbidden to speak on account of my dear little lungs which had been coughed to atoms, so conversation did not give me much help to a letter. Moreover, they gave me all sorts of lowering medicines—hemlock and henbane, or words to that effect (I never can remember the names of drugs)—and made me so languid that the weight of a pen was a great deal too much for my delicate frame. However, I believe they have nearly cured me, and it does not signify now it is over, though I still think that if there were an inflammation on the chest to be done, it would have been more for the general good that O’Connell[364] should have it instead of me. Anything to silence that dreadful tongue of his, which is frightening the Isle from its propriety most rapidly. They say that he said to Lord Anglesey[365] at one of his levées, “I shall give you some trouble yet, My Lord,” to which Lord A. answered, “Yes, I know you will, but I shall hang you at last.” It is a neat dialogue, and the story is a good one, and certainly would have been true if O’Connell had been at a levée. As he has not, there is of course no foundation for it, but we can believe it all the same.
Barring Ireland, which I do not fret about, because we have been in the habit of conquering it once in every thirty years and it is time now for a fight, things are looking more prosperous. Our revenue they say is good, and our manufactories are flourishing to the highest possible degree. George saw some of the silk people on Saturday, who told him that several of the great silk houses had refused to take any more orders, having as much to do as they can this year. Birmingham is very busy; the wool trade is in the greatest prosperity; in short, if Parliament were never to meet again, if that were to be the reform Lord Grey would propose, we should do very well.