This fête furnished some items for Willis’s story of “Lady Ravelgold.”
“12. Dined with Mrs. Joanna Baillie at Hampstead. She gave me some of the wedding cake of Ada Byron. Said that her husband, Lord King, was hated by his own father and mother and often in want of money, but an excellent person and beloved by his own second brother, who had received from the father all that was not entailed. On the death of the father, Lord K. had nine thousand a year. Mrs. Baillie said that Lady Byron had given to the present Lord B. her whole jointure when he came to the title.
“Went to Lady Blessington at ten, and had a long talk with Countess Guiccioli, who said she wished nevermore to be spoken of in good or ill. The evil was remembered and the good forgotten. She made a point of never reading the papers.
“Thence to Charles Kemble’s soirée. Countess d’Orsay there.”
And thus the journal proceeds with its daily count of dinners, balls, soirées, garden parties, and opera-going, the diarist finally recording himself as “fatigued to death with dinners and dissipations.” In fact the pace began to tell upon him. Following the last entry that I have copied here, for July 12th, comes the first draft of a poem, “Thoughts on the Balcony of Devonshire House at Sunrise after a Splendid Ball:”
“Morn in the East! How coldly fair
It breaks upon my fevered eye!
How chides the calm and dewy air;
How chides the pure and pearly sky!
The stars melt in a brighter fire,—