When I first knew Caroline Sheridan, she had not long been married to the Hon. George Norton. She was splendidly handsome, of an un-English character of beauty, her rather large and heavy head and features recalling the grandest Grecian and Italian models, to the latter of whom her rich coloring and blue-black braids of hair gave her an additional resemblance. Though neither as perfectly lovely as the Duchess of Somerset, nor as perfectly charming as Lady Dufferin, she produced a far more striking impression than either of them, by the combination of the poetical genius with which she alone, of the three, was gifted, with the brilliant wit and power of repartee which they (especially Lady Dufferin) possessed in common with her, united to the exceptional beauty with which they were all three endowed. Mrs. Norton was extremely epigrammatic in her talk, and comically dramatic in her manner of narrating things. I do not know whether she had any theatrical talent, though she sang pathetic and humorous songs admirably, and I remember shaking in my shoes when, soon after I came out, she told me she envied me, and would give anything to try the stage herself. I thought, as I looked at her wonderful, beautiful face, "Oh, if you should, what would become of me!" She was no musician, but had a deep, sweet contralto voice, precisely the same in which she always spoke, and which, combined with her always lowered eyelids ("downy eyelids" with sweeping silken fringes), gave such incomparably comic effect to her sharp retorts and ludicrous stories; and she sang with great effect her own and Lady Dufferin's social satires, "Fanny Grey," and "Miss Myrtle," etc., and sentimental songs like "Would I were with Thee," "I dreamt 'twas but a Dream," etc., of which the words were her own, and the music, which only amounted to a few chords with the simplest modulations, her own also. I remember she used occasionally to convulse her friends en petit comité with a certain absurd song called "The Widow," to all intents and purposes a piece of broad comedy, the whole story of which (the wooing of a disconsolate widow by a rich lover, whom she first rejects and then accepts) was comprised in a few words, rather spoken than sung, eked out by a ludicrous burden of "rum-ti-iddy-iddy-iddy-ido," which, by dint of her countenance and voice, conveyed all the alternations of the widow's first despair, her lover's fiery declaration, her virtuous indignation and wrathful rejection of him, his cool acquiescence and intimation that his full purse assured him an easy acceptance in various other quarters, her rage and disappointment at his departure, and final relenting and consent on his return; all of which with her "iddy-iddy-ido" she sang, or rather acted, with incomparable humor and effect. I admired her extremely.

In 1841 I began a visit of two years and a half in England. During this time I constantly met Mrs. Norton in society. She was living with her uncle, Charles Sheridan, and still maintained her glorious supremacy of beauty and wit in the great London world. She came often to parties at our house, and I remember her asking us to dine at her uncle's, when among the people we met were Lord Lansdowne and Lord Normanby, both then in the ministry, whose good-will and influence she was exerting herself to captivate in behalf of a certain shy, silent, rather rustic gentleman from the far-away province of New Brunswick, Mr. Samuel Cunard, afterwards Sir Samuel Cunard of the great mail-packet line of steamers between England and America. He had come to London an obscure and humble individual, endeavoring to procure from the government the sole privilege of carrying the transatlantic mails for his line of steamers. Fortunately for him he had some acquaintance with Mrs. Norton, and the powerful beauty, who was kind-hearted and good-natured to all but her natural enemies (i.e. the members of her own London society), exerted all her interest with her admirers in high place in favor of Cunard, and had made this very dinner for the express purpose of bringing her provincial protégé into pleasant personal relations with Lord Lansdowne and Lord Normanby, who were likely to be of great service to him in the special object which had brought him to England. The only other individual I remember at the dinner was that most beautiful person, Lady Harriet d'Orsay. Years after, when the Halifax projector had become Sir Samuel Cunard, a man of fame in the worlds of commerce and business of New York and London, a baronet of large fortune, and a sort of proprietor of the Atlantic Ocean between England and the United States, he reminded me of this charming dinner in which Mrs. Norton had so successfully found the means of forwarding his interests, and spoke with enthusiasm of her kind-heartedness as well as her beauty and talents; he, of course, passed under the Caudine Forks, beneath which all men encountering her had to bow and throw down their arms. She was very fond of inventing devices for seals, and other such ingenious exercises of her brains, and she gave —— a star with the motto, "Procul sed non extincta," which she civilly said bore reference to me in my transatlantic home. She also told me, when we were talking of mottoes for seals and rings, that she had had engraved on a ring she always wore the name of that miserable bayou of the Mississippi—Atchafalaya—where Gabriel passes near one side of an island, while Evangeline, in her woe-begone search, is lying asleep on the other; and that, to her surprise, she found that the King of the Belgians wore a ring on which he had had the same word engraved, as an expression of the bitterest and most hopeless disappointment.

In 1845 I passed through London, and spent a few days there with my father, on my way to Italy. Mrs. Norton, hearing of my being in town, came to see me, and urged me extremely to go and dine with her before I left London, which I did. The event of the day in her society was the death of Lady Holland, about which there were a good many lamentations, of which Lady T—— gave the real significance, with considerable naïveté: "Ah, poore deare Ladi Ollande! It is a grate pittie; it was suche a pleasant 'ouse!" As I had always avoided Lady Holland's acquaintance, I could merely say that the regrets I heard expressed about her seemed to me only to prove a well-known fact—how soon the dead were forgotten. The real sorrow was indeed for the loss of her house, that pleasantest of all London rendezvouses, and not for its mistress, though those whom I then heard speak were probably among the few who did regret her. Lady Holland had one good quality (perhaps more than one, which I might have found out if I had known her): she was a constant and exceedingly warm friend, and extended her regard and remembrance to all whom Lord Holland or herself had ever received with kindness or on a cordial footing. My brother John had always been treated with great friendliness by Lord Holland, and in her will Lady Holland, who had not seen him for years, left him as a memento a copy, in thirty-two volumes, of the English essayists, which had belonged to her husband.

Almost immediately after this transient renewal of my intercourse with Mrs. Norton, I left England for Italy, and did not see her again for several years. The next time I did so was at an evening party at my sister's house, where her appearance struck me more than it had ever done. Her dress had something to do with this effect, no doubt. She had a rich gold-colored silk on, shaded and softened all over with black lace draperies, and her splendid head, neck, and arms were adorned with magnificently simple Etruscan gold ornaments, which she had brought from Rome, whence she had just returned, and where the fashion of that famous antique jewelry had lately been revived. She was still "une beauté triomphante à faire voir aux ambassadeurs."

During one of my last sojourns in London I met Mrs. Norton at Lansdowne House. There was a great assembly there, and she was wandering through the rooms leaning on the arm of her youngest son, her glorious head still crowned with its splendid braids of hair, and wreathed with grapes and ivy leaves, and this was my last vision of her; but, in the autumn of 1870, Lady C—— told me of meeting her in London society, now indeed quite old, but indomitably handsome and witty.

I think it only humane to state, for the benefit of all mothers anxious for their daughters', and all daughters anxious for their own, future welfare in this world, that in the matter of what the lady's-maid in the play calls "the first of earthly blessings—personal appearance," Caroline Sheridan as a girl was so little distinguished by the exceptional beauty she subsequently developed, that her lovely mother, who had a right to be exacting in the matter, entertained occasionally desponding misgivings as to the future comeliness of one of the most celebrated beauties of her day.

At the time of my earliest acquaintance with the Nortons, our friends the Basil Montagus had left their house in Bedford Square, and were also living at Storey's Gate. Among the remarkable people I met at their house was the Indian rajah, Ramohun Roy, philosopher, scholar, reformer, Quaker, theist, I know not what and what not, who was introduced to me, and was kind enough to take some notice of me. He talked to me of the literature of his own country, especially its drama, and, finding that I was already acquainted with the Hindoo theatre through the medium of my friend Mr. Horace Wilson's translations of its finest compositions, but that I had never read "Sakuntalà," the most remarkable of them all, which Mr. Wilson had not included in his collection (I suppose because of its translation by Sir William Jones), Ramohun Roy sent me a copy of it, which I value extremely as a memento of so remarkable a man, but in which I confess I am utterly unable to find the extraordinary beauty and sublimity which he attributed to it, and of which I remember Goethe also speaks enthusiastically (if I am not mistaken, in his conversations with Eckermann), calling it the most wonderful production of human genius. Goethe had not, any more than myself, the advantage of reading "Sakuntalà" in Sanskrit, and I am quite at a loss to account for the extreme and almost exaggerated admiration he expresses for it.

James Street, Buckingham Gate, August 23, ——.

My dearest H——,

I received your last on my return from the country, where I had been staying a fortnight, and I assure you that after an uncomfortable and rainy drive into town I found it of more service in warming me than even the blazing fire with which we are obliged to shame the month of August.