Records of Later Life

by Fanny Kemble

But though one man may take the mare to the water, no given number of men can make her drink; so, having accepted my place, I determined my complaisance should end there, and, in spite of all Lady Holland's conversational efforts, and her final exclamation, "Allen! do get Mrs. Butler to talk! We really must make her talk!" I held my peace, and kept the peace, which I could have done upon no other conditions; but the unnatural and unwholesome effort disagreed with me so dreadfully, that I have a return of dyspepsia whenever I think of it, which I think justifies me in my dislike of Lady Holland.... I do not feel inclined to attribute to any motive but a kindly one, the attention Lady Holland showed my father during a severe indisposition of his, not long after this; though, upon her driving to his door one day with some peculiarly delicate jelly she had had made for him, Frederick Byng (Poodle, as he was always called by his intimates, on account of his absurd resemblance to a dog of that species), seeing the remorseful gratitude on my face as I received her message of inquiry after my father, exclaimed, "Now, she's done it! now, she's won it! now, she's got you, and you'll go to Holland House!" "No, I won't," said I, "but I'll go down to the carriage, and thank her!" which I immediately did, without stopping to put a bonnet on my head. Lady Holland was held, by those who knew her, to be a warm and constant friend, and had always been cordially kind to my father and my brother John.

LADY MORLEY. After Lord Holland's death she left Holland House, and took up her abode in South Street near the Park. One morning, when I was calling on Lady Charlotte Lindsay, Lady Morley came in, and being reproached by Lady Charlotte for not having come to a party at her house on the previous evening, in which reproach I joined, having been also a loser by her absence from that same party, "Couldn't," said the lively lady, "for I was spending the evening with the pleasantest, most amiable, gentlest-mannered, sweetest-tempered, and most charming woman in all London—Lady Holland!" A conversation then ensued, in which certainly little quarter was shown to the ill qualities of the former mistress of Holland House. Among several curious instances of her unaccountably unamiable conduct to some of even Lord Holland's dearest friends, who, for his sake, opened their houses to her, allowed her to come thither, bespeaking her own rooms—her own company, who she would meet and who she would bring, and in every way consulting her pleasure and convenience, as was invariably the case on the occasion of her visits to Panshanger and Woburn,—Lady Morley said that Landseer had told her, that he was walking one day by the side of Lady Holland's wheel-chair, in the grounds of Holland House, and, stopping at a particularly pretty spot, had said, "Oh, Lady Holland! this is the part of your place of which the Duchess of Bedford has such a charming view from her house on the hill above." "Is it?" said Lady Holland; and immediately gave orders that the paling-fence round that part of her grounds should be raised so as to cut off the Duchess's view into them.

Upon my venturing to express my surprise that anybody should go to the house of a person of whom they told such anecdotes, Lady Morley replied, "She is the only woman in the world of whom one does tell such things and yet goes to see her. She is the most miserable woman in England; she is entirely alone now, and she cannot bear to be alone, and, for his sake who was the dearest and most excellent and amiable creature that ever breathed, one goes on going to her, as I shall till she or I die." But what a description of the last days of the mistress of Holland House!

Sidney Smith, with whom I had become well acquainted when I wrote the letter to Lady Dacre in which I mention him, used to amuse himself, and occasionally some of my other friends, by teasing me on the subject of what he called my hallucination with regard to my having married in America. He never allowed any allusion to the circumstance without the most comical expressions of regret for this, as he called it, curious form of monomania. On the occasion to which I refer in this letter, he and Mrs. Smith had met some friends at dinner at our house, and I was taking leave of them, previous to my departure for Liverpool, when he exclaimed, "Now do, my dear child, be persuaded to give up this extraordinary delusion; let it, I beg, be recorded of us both, that this pleasing and intelligent young lady labored under the singular and distressingly insane idea that she had contracted a marriage with an American; from which painful hallucination she was eventually delivered by the friendly exhortations of a learned and pious divine, the Rev. Sydney Smith." Everybody round us was in fits of laughter, as he affectionately held my hand, and thus paternally admonished me. I held up my left hand with its wedding-ring, and began, "Oh, but the baby!" when the ludicrous look with which my reverend tormentor received this overwhelming testimony of mine, threw the whole company into convulsions, and nothing was heard throughout the room but sighs and sobs of exhaustion, and faint ejaculations and cries for mercy, while everybody was wiping tears of laughter from their eyes. As for me, I covered up my face, and very nearly went into hysterics.

The special and reportable sallies of Sydney Smith have been, of course, often repeated, but the fanciful fun and inexhaustible humorous drollery of his conversation among his intimates can never be adequately rendered or reproduced. He bubbled over with mirth, of which his own enjoyment formed an irresistible element, he shook, and his eyes glistened at his own ludicrous ideas, as they dawned upon his brain; and it would be impossible to convey the faintest idea of the genial humor of his habitual talk by merely repeating separate witticisms and repartees.

On that same evening, at my father's house, the comparative cheapness of living abroad and in England having been discussed, Sydney Smith declared that, for his part, he had never found foreign quarters so much more reasonable than home ones, or foreign hotels less exorbitant in their charges. "I know I never could live under fifty pounds a week," said he. "Oh, but how did you live?" was the next question. "Why, as a canon should live," proudly retorted he; "and they charged me as enemy's ordnance."

A question having arisen one evening at Miss Berry's as to the welcome Lady Sale would receive in London society after her husband's heroic conduct, and her heroic participation in it, during the Afghan war, Miss Berry, who, for some reason or other, did not admire Lady Sale as much as everybody else did, said she should not ask her to come to her house. "Oh, yes! pooh! pooh! you will," exclaimed Sydney Smith; "you'll have her, he'll have her, they'll have her, we'll have her. She'll be Sale by auction!" Later on that same evening, it being asked what Lord Dalhousie would get for his successful exploit in carrying of the gates of some Indian town, "Why," cried Lady Morley, "he will be created Duke Samson Afghanistes." It was pleasant living among people who talked such nonsense as that.

A party having been made to go and see the Boa Constrictor soon after its first arrival at the Zoölogical Gardens, Sydney Smith, who was to have been there, failed to come; and, questioned at dinner why he had not done so, said, "Because I was detained by the Bore Contradictor—Hallam"—whose propensity to controvert people's propositions was a subject of irritation to some of his friends, less retentive of memory and accurate in statement than himself.

Sydney Smith, not unnaturally, preferred conversation to music; and at a musical party one evening, as he was stealing on tip-toe from the concert-room to one more remote from the performance, I held up my finger at him, when he whispered, "My dear, it's all right. You keep with the dilettanti; I go with the talkettanti." Afterwards, upon my expostulating with him, and telling him that by such habits he was running a risk of being called to order on some future eternal day with "Angel Sydney Smith, hush!" if he did not learn to endure music better, he replied, "Oh, no, no! I'm cultivating a judicious second expressly for those occasions."

Of his lamentations for the "flashes of silence" which, he said, at one time made Macaulay's intercourse possible, one has heard; but when he was so ill that all his friends were full of anxiety about him, M——, having called to see him, and affectionately asking what sort of night he had passed, Sydney Smith replied, "Oh, horrid, horrid, my dear fellow! I dreamt I was chained to a rock and being talked to death by Harriet Martineau and Macaulay."