Their handsome young leader is distinguished by his commanding air and his splendid dress, in the style of the Italian banditti. After a short interval you see the castle-gates in the distance unclose, a drawbridge is let down, and a state-carriage drawn by six mules rolls along the road. Sometimes you lose it behind the mountains;—it approaches, growing larger and larger (an effect admirably produced by figures of various dimensions,) and at length comes on the stage at a brisk trot. A few shots are immediately fired by the robbers, the coachman is killed, and the plunder of the carriage goes forward amid noise and confusion. In the midst of the tumult the curtain falls.
At the beginning of the second act you see the same scene, but it excites quite different emotions. The lights in the castle are extinguished,—the moon is veiled behind a cloud. In the dim light you imperfectly distinguish the carriage, with the doors rent from the hinges. On the box lies the murdered driver; the pallid head of one of the fallen robbers is seen above a stone trench; and the handsome captain leans dying against the trunk of a tree, while his boy Gilblas is vainly trying to check the flight of the departing spirit. This half-dead, half-living picture, is extremely powerful and touching.
My morning calls were useful, for they procured me three tickets for the next Almack’s; and I prevailed upon one of the most rigorous and dreaded of Patronesses to give me a ticket for a little obscure ‘Miss of my acquaintance,’—an immense ‘faveur!’ I was, however, obliged to manœuvre and entreat a long time to obtain it. The young lady and her party nearly kissed my hands, and behaved as if they had gained the great prize in the lottery.
After Almack’s, there is no way of approaching an English lady so good as politics. There has been nothing to be heard lately, whether at dinner or at the Opera, nay even at balls, but Canning and Wellington from every pretty mouth; nay, Lord E—— complained that his wife disturbed him with politics at night. She frightened him by suddenly calling out in her sleep, “Will the Premier stand or fall?”
If I improve myself in nothing else here, I shall in politics and cabriolet-driving; the latter one learns to perfection. You wind along at full speed, among carts and carriages, where you would have thought you must have stopped for minutes. A residence in such a metropolis of the world certainly tends to correct all one’s small views of things: one regards them in a broader manner, and more ‘en bloc.’
May 10th.
The eternal uniformity of the season goes on for ever. A soirée at Lady Cowper’s, one of the gentlest of Lady-patronesses; another at Lady Jersey’s, one of the handsomest and most distinguished women in England,—both preceded by an Indian mélodrame,—filled my evening very agreeably. The scene of the mélodrame lay in an island whose inhabitants were endowed with the delightful gift of flying. The prettiest girls came floating in in masses, like flights of cranes, and when very pressingly courted just let their wings sink; but if you were emboldened by this,—a nod—and the graceful, many-coloured folds expanded, and away they went; nor could one so much as see the slender cords by which they were drawn up.
At a dinner and soirée at Prince Polignac’s there were several interesting persons; among them the Governor of Odessa, one of the most agreeable Russians I have seen, and Sir Thomas Lawrence, the celebrated painter. I was told that he regularly loses at billiards (of which he makes the great mistake of fancying himself a master) the enormous sums he gains by his art. He is a man of interesting appearance, with something ‘du moyen age’ in his features, strongly reminding one of the pictures of the Venetian school.
Still more was I attracted by the Portuguese eyes of the Marchioness ——: Portuguese and Spanish eyes eclipse all others.
Prince Polignac’s niece told me that her uncle’s hair, which is perfectly white, while the rest of his appearance is youthful and agreeable, had turned gray at the age of five-and-twenty, in the course of a few weeks, from the anxiety and horror of a revolutionary dungeon.[56] He may well find the present contrast agreeable; but, alas! the Restoration cannot restore the colour of his hair. I was interested by this circumstance; for you know, my good Julia, mine has also patriotically begun to assume our national colours, white and black.