The poor Duke of York is at length dead, after a long illness, and lay in state yesterday with great magnificence. I saw him in October, and found him, even then, the shadow of the robust stately man whom I had formerly so often seen at Lady L——’s, and at his own house, where six bottles of claret after dinner scarcely made a perceptible change in his countenance. I remember that in one such evening,—it was indeed already after midnight,—he took some of his guests, among whom were the Austrian Ambassador, Count Meerveldt, Count Beroldingen, and myself, into his beautiful armoury. We tried to swing several Turkish sabres, but none of us had a very firm grasp; whence it happened that the Duke and Count Meerveldt both scratched themselves with a sort of straight Indian sword, so as to draw blood. Count Meerveldt then wished to try if it cut as well as a real Damascus, and undertook to cut through one of the wax candles which stood on the table. The experiment answered so ill, that both the candles, candlesticks and all, fell to the ground and were extinguished. While we were groping about in the dark, and trying to find the door, the Duke’s aide-de-camp, Colonel C——, stammered out in great agitation, “By God, Sir, I remember the sword is poisoned!” You may conceive the agreeable feelings of the wounded at this intelligence. Happily on further examination it appeared that claret and not poison was at the bottom of the Colonel’s exclamation.
The Duke seems to be much regretted, and the whole country wears deep mourning for him, with crape on the hat, and black gloves, ‘ce qui fait le désespoir’ of all shopkeepers. People put their servants into black liveries, and write on paper with a broad black edge. Meantime the Christmas pantomimes go on as merrily as ever. It has a strange effect to see Harlequin and Columbine skipping about on the stage in all conceivable frivolities and antics, while the coal-black audience, dressed as for a funeral procession, clap and shout with delight.
I this minute received your letter from B——. Really so merry, I might almost say so pungent a one, you have not written of a long time. The B—— originals seem to have quite electrified you, and though I rejoice at it, I can’t help being a little jealous. But you will soon come back to your original. I say with Cæsar, I fear not the fat, but the lean; and so long as you tell me that you preserve your charming ‘embonpoint,’ I am easy. I had a great mind, however, to plague you a little in return; but I know you don’t bear jesting ‘par distance’ well, so I abstain. To vent my humour in some way, I send you a bit out of my journal,—a ‘pendant’ to your African Travels; for the poor meagre journal is still alive, though it has received no nutriment by the month together, and the little it has had, has not the least ‘haut gout.’ Don’t expect, therefore, anything facetious or satirical, but something quite serious. It is laid upon you as a punishment.
EXTRACTS FROM MY JOURNAL.
I was lately reading a review of Lady Morgan’s Salvator Rosa. A passage in it touched me deeply, ‘et pour cause.’ It is the very original description of her hero, nearly as follows.
“With a thirst for praise, which scarcely any applause could satisfy, Salvator united a quickness of perception that rendered him suspicious of pleasing, even at the moment he was most successful. A gaping mouth, a closing lid, a languid look, or an impatient hem! threw him into utter confusion, and deprived him of all presence of mind, of all power of concealing his mortification.... Abandoned by the idle and the great, whom his delightful talents had so long contributed to amuse, he voluntarily excluded himself from the few true and staunch friends who clung to him in his adversity, and shut himself up equally from all he loved and all he despised.... His reference to this journey is curious, as being illustrative of those high imaginations, and lofty and lonely feelings, in which lay all the secret of his peculiar genius: while his pantings after solitude, his vain repinings, exhibit the struggles of a mind divided between a natural love of repose and a factitious ambition for the world’s notice and the eclat of fame,—no unusual contrast in those who, being highly gifted and highly organized, are placed by nature above their species in all the splendid endowments of intellect; and who are, by the same nature, again drawn down to its level through their social and sympathetic affections.... His fine but fatal organization, which rendered him so susceptible of impressions, whether of good or evil, and which left him at times no shelter against ‘horrible imaginings,’ or against those real inflictions, calumny and slander, plunged him too frequently into fits of listless melancholy, when, disabused of all illusion, he saw the species to which he belonged in all the nakedness of its inherent infirmity.”
Yes, this picture is copied from the very soul; and it is no less true, that a man born with such a disposition can never feel at ease or happy in the world which surrounds him, unless he be placed very much above it, or live in it entirely unnoticed.
So far I was led by the thoughts of others. Now I must conclude for to-day with a few of my own, the subject of which lies far nearer to our inmost hearts; and discuss a question, the full investigation of which must interest every one, be he ever so little a philosopher by profession.
What is conscience?
Conscience has unquestionably a twofold nature, as it has a twofold source. The one flows from our highest strength, the other from our greatest weakness; the one from the spirit of God dwelling in us, the other from sensual fear. Perfectly to dissever and distinguish these two kinds of conscience, is necessary to that serenity of mind which can arise only out of the utmost possible clearness: for man, when he has once got beyond the original dominant instinct of feeling, attains to the Permanent, even the recognition of truth, only by mental labour and conflict,—the moral ‘sweat of his brow.’