We settled in town a week ago, as the drives from Greenwich were becoming cold and dark for George. There are several people in town I know. Maria is looking very well and seems pleased and contented—neither in great spirits, nor otherwise.
We have seen Colonel Arden very often lately; he and Mr. Warrender having been kept in town for the hopeless purpose of arranging Lord Alvanley’s affairs. I suspect dear Alvanley is after all little better than a swindler. He writes beautiful letters to Lord Skelmersdale, one of his trustees, and says he feels he deserves all the misery he is suffering, which misery consists in sitting in an arm-chair from breakfast till dinner-time cracking his jokes without ceasing. He has taught his servant to come into the room and ask what time his Lordship would like the carriage, and what orders he has for his groom, because he thinks it sounds cheerful, though he has neither carriage nor horses. But it looks better. When Brooke Greville was describing to him the beautiful gilding of his house in Hill Street, which is a wonderful concern, Lord Alvanley said, “My dear Brooke, if you would carve a little more, and gild a little less, it would be a more hospitable way of going on.” Yours ever
E. E.
Miss Eden to Mrs. Lister.
GREENWICH PARK,
Thursday evening, April 18, 1832.
MY DEAREST THERESA, I should not much wonder if you were coming to the crisis; that feeling so well is suspicious. Never mind; “all things must have their end,” as Isabella says in the Tragedy, and “all things must have their beginnings,” as your child[376] will probably say if you will give it an opportunity. I quite forgot to mention to you to let it be a girl, I like girls best. I see Mrs. Keppel, to save all disputes, has brought both a boy and girl into the world; but that is such an expensive amusement, you would not like that. If it is a boy, you ought to call it Arlington[377] as a delicate attention to Mr. Lister. I mention these little elegant flatteries out of regard to your domestic peace, as from various observations I have lately been driven to make amongst my acquaintances, I do not think wives pay half enough attention to their husbands, though this does not apply to you.
Yes, as you say, that division is satisfactory to Lord Grey,[378] but still if there were a shadow of an excuse for making a dozen Peers without affronting two dozen who are made, I should be glad.
The division was a pleasing surprise to me. I had been awake since four that night, and at last had settled that George must have come home and gone to bed, and that nobody had voted for us but just the Cabinet Ministers, and then I heard the house-door bang, and knew by the way in which he rushed up stairs how it was. Now it is over, and that our enemies have not triumphed, I am left with a sort of wish—that is, not a wish, but an idea—that it might have ended (just for fun) the other way. I should so like to know what would have come next. It is all so like a game at chess, and I was anxious to know how Lord Grey would get out of check. However, I am delighted with the game as it is; only it would have been a curious speculation, wouldn’t it? I see we are to have longer holidays, which makes me dote upon them all, both Greys and Salisburys, for so arranging it, and George is enchanted with it. He comes to-morrow, which is good for my gardening tastes and bad for my church-going habits.
There are lectures at the church every evening by an excellent preacher, and when George is in town, Fanny and I dine early and go to them. But I behaved so ill last night. I was shown into a large pew, a voiture à huit places, where there were seven old ladies, highly respectable and attentive, and four of us sat opposite to the other four. The clergyman, the curate of the parish, made a slight allusion to his superior officer, the rector, who happens to be ill, and made a commonplace remark on his own inferiority, etc., whereupon one of the old ladies began to cry. The next, seeing that, began to cry too, and so it went all round the pew, but so slowly that the last did not begin to cry till a quarter of an hour at least after she had heard of the rector’s illness, and till the sermon was fairly directed against some of the difficulties of St. Paul. Their crying set me off laughing, and you know what a horrid convulsion that sort of suppressed laughter, which one feels to be wrong, turns into. I hope they thought I was crying.
Our hyacinths are too lovely; quite distressing to see how large and double they are, because they will die soon. If they were only single, poor little wretches, it would not signify their lasting so short a time. I think the great fault of the garden is the constant flurry the flowers are in. Perhaps you have not found that out, but fancied they were quiet amusements; but that is an error. They either won’t come up at all, or they come at the wrong time, and the frost and the sun and the rain and the drought all bother them. And then, the instant they look beautiful, they die. I observe that a genuine fancier, like George, does not care a straw for the flower itself, but merely for the cutting, or the root, or the seed. However, I must say he contrives always to have quantities of beautiful flowers, hurrying on one after the other.