Mrs. Grote labored hard to procure her acceptance in society; her personal kindness to her was of the most generous description: but her great object of making "an honest woman" of her, I believe failed signally in every way.
On one occasion I paid Mrs. Grote a visit at Burnham Beeches. Our party consisted only of my sister and myself; the Viennese composer, Dessauer; and Chorley, the musical critic of the Athenæum, who was very intimately acquainted with us all. The eccentricities of our hostess, with which some of us were already tolerably familiar, were a source of unfeigned amazement and awe to Dessauer, who, himself the most curious, quaint, and withal nervously excitable and irritable humorist, was thrown into alternate convulsions of laughter and spasms of terror at the portentous female figure, who, with a stick in her hand, a man's hat on her head, and a coachman's box-coat of drab cloth with manifold capes over her petticoats (English women had not yet then adopted a costume undistinguishable from that of the other sex), stalked about the house and grounds, alternately superintending various matters of the domestic economy, and discussing, with equal knowledge and discrimination, questions of musical criticism and taste.
One most ludicrous scene which took place on this occasion I shall never forget. She had left us to our own devices, and we were all in the garden. I was sitting in a swing, and my sister, Dessauer, and Chorley were lying on the lawn at my feet, when presently, striding towards us, appeared the extravagant figure of Mrs. Grote, who, as soon as she was within speaking-trumpet distance, hailed us with a stentorian challenge about some detail of dinner—I think it was whether the majority voted for bacon and peas or bacon and beans. Having duly settled this momentous question, as Mrs. Grote turned and marched away, Dessauer—who had been sitting straight up, listening with his head first on one side and then on the other, like an eagerly intelligent terrier, taking no part in the culinary controversy (indeed, his entire ignorance of English necessarily disqualified him for even comprehending it), but staring intently, with open eyes and mouth, at Mrs. Grote—suddenly began, with his hands and lips, to imitate the rolling of a drum, and then broke out aloud with, "Malbrook s'en [vat' en] guerre," etc.; whereupon the terrible lady faced right about, like a soldier, and, planting her stick in the ground, surveyed Dessauer with an awful countenance. The wretched little man grew red and then purple, and then black in the face with fear and shame; and exclaiming in his agony, "Ah, bonté divine! elle m'a compris!" rolled over and over on the lawn as if he had a fit. Mrs. Grote majestically waved her hand, and with magnanimous disdain of her small adversary turned and departed, and we remained horror-stricken at the effect of this involuntary tribute of Dessauer's to her martial air and deportment.
When she returned, however, it was to enter into a most interesting and animated discussion upon the subject of Glück's music; and suddenly, some piece from the "Iphigenia" being mentioned, she shouted for her man-servant, to whom on his appearance she gave orders to bring her a chair and footstool, and "the big fiddle" (the violoncello) out of the hall; and taking it forthwith between her knees, proceeded to play, with excellent taste and expression, some of Glück's noble music upon the sonorous instrument, with which St. Cecilia is the only female I ever saw on terms of such familiar intimacy.
MRS. GROTE AND FANNY ELLSLER. The second time Mrs. Grote invited me to the Beeches, it was to meet Mdlle. Ellsler. A conversation I had with my admirable and excellent friend Sydney Smith determined me to decline joining the party. He wound up his kind and friendly advice to me upon the subject by saying, "No, no, my child; that's all very well for Grota" (the name he always gave Mrs. Grote, whose good qualities and abilities he esteemed very highly, whatever he may have thought of her eccentricities); "but don't mix yourself up with that sort of thing." And I had reason to rejoice that I followed his good advice. Mrs. Grote told me, in the course of a conversation we once had on the subject of Mdlle. Ellsler, that when the latter went to America, she, Mrs. Grote, had undertaken most generously the entire care and charge of her child, a lovely little girl of about six years old. "All I said to her," said this strange, kind-hearted woman, "was 'Well, Fanny, send the brat to me; I don't ask you whose child it is, and I don't care, so long as it isn't that fool d'Orsay's'" (Mrs. Grote had small esteem for the dandy of his day), "'and I'll take the best care of it I can.'" And she did take the kindest care of it during the whole period of Mdlle. Ellsler's absence from Europe.
The next time I visited the Beeches was after an interval of some years, when I went thither with my kind and constant friend Mr. Rogers. My circumstances had altered very painfully, and I was again laboring for my own support.
I went down to Burnham with the old poet, and was sorry to find that, though he had consented to pay Mrs. Grote this visit, he was not in particularly harmonious tune for her society, which was always rather a trial to his fastidious nerves and refined taste. The drive of between three and four miles in a fly (very different from his own luxurious carriage), through intricate lanes and rural winding avenues, did not tend to soften his acerbities, and I perceived at once, on alighting from the carriage, that the aspect of the place did not find favor in his eyes.
Mrs. Grote had just put up an addition to her house, a sort of single wing, which added a good-sized drawing-room to the modest mansion I had before visited. Whatever accession of comfort the house received within from this addition to its size, its beauty, externally, was not improved by it, and Mr. Rogers stood before the offending edifice, surveying it with a sardonic sneer that I should think even brick and mortar must have found it hard to bear. He had hardly uttered his three first disparaging bitter sentences, of utter scorn and abhorrence of the architectural abortion, which, indeed it was, when Mrs. Grote herself made her appearance in her usual country costume, box-coat, hat on her head, and stick in her hand. Mr. Rogers turned to her with a verjuice smile, and said, "I was just remarking that in whatever part of the world I had seen this building I should have guessed to whose taste I might attribute its erection." To which, without an instant's hesitation, she replied, "Ah, 'tis a beastly thing, to be sure. The confounded workmen played the devil with the place while I was away." Then, without any more words, she led the way to the interior of her habitation, and I could not but wonder whether her blunt straightforwardness did not disconcert and rebuke Mr. Rogers for his treacherous sneer.
During this visit, much interesting conversation passed with reference to the letters of Sydney Smith, who was just dead; and the propriety of publishing all his correspondence, which, of course, contained strictures and remarks upon people with whom he had been living in habits of friendly social intimacy. I remember one morning a particularly lively discussion on the subject, between Mrs. Grote and Mr. Rogers. The former had a great many letters from Sydney Smith, and urged the impossibility of publishing them, with all their comments on members of the London world. Rogers, on the contrary, apparently delighted at the idea of the mischief such revelations would make, urged Mrs. Grote to give them ungarbled to the press. "Oh, but now," said the latter, "here, for instance, Mr. Rogers, such a letter as this, about ——; do see how he cuts up the poor fellow. It really never would do to publish it." Rogers took the letter from her, and read it with a stony grin of diabolical delight on his countenance and occasional chuckling exclamations of "Publish it! publish it! Put an R, dash, or an R and four stars for the name. He'll never know it, though everybody else will." While Mr. Rogers was thus delecting himself, in anticipation, with R——'s execution, Mrs. Grote, by whose side I was sitting on a low stool, quietly unfolded another letter of Sydney Smith's, and silently held it before my eyes, and the very first words in it were a most ludicrous allusion to Rogers's cadaverous appearance. As I raised my eyes from this most absurd description of him, and saw him still absorbed in his evil delight, the whole struck me as so like a scene in a farce that I could not refrain from bursting out laughing.
In talking of Sydney Smith Mr. Rogers gave us many amusing details of various visits he paid him at his place in Somersetshire, Combe Flory, where, on one occasion, Jeffrey was also one of the party. It was to do honor to these illustrious guests that Sydney Smith had a pair of horns fastened on his donkey, who was turned into the paddock so adorned, in order, as he said, to give the place a more noble and park-like appearance; and it was on this same donkey that Jeffrey mounted when Sydney Smith exclaimed with such glee—