The note appended, which appears only in the first edition, is as follows: "This sonnet, and the two following, my earliest attempts at that form of versification, were addressed to R. S. Jameson, Esq., on occasion of meeting him in London, after a separation of some years. He was the favourite companion of my boyhood, the active friend and sincere counsellor of my youth. 'Though seas between us broad ha' roll'd' since we 'travelled side by side' last, I trust the sight of this little volume will give rise to recollections that will make him ten years younger. He is now Judge Advocate at Dominica, and husband of Mrs. Jameson, authoress of the 'Diary of an Ennuyée,' 'Loves of the Poets,' and other agreeable productions."
Mr. Jameson was a man of high culture and fine literary tastes. He was, moreover, an amateur artist of no ordinary skill, as extant drawings of his in water-colours attest. His countenance, especially in his old age, was of the Jeremy Bentham stamp.
It was from the house on the west of Brock Street that Mrs. Jameson dated the letters which constitute her well-known "Winter Studies and Summer Rambles." That volume thus closes: "At three o'clock in the morning, just as the moon was setting on Lake Ontario, I arrived at the door of my own house in Toronto, having been absent on this wild expedition [to the Sault] just two months." York had then been two years Toronto. (For having ventured to pass down the rapids at the Sault, she had been formally named by the Otchipways of the locality, Was-sa-je-wun-e-qua, "Woman of the Bright Stream.")
The Preface to the American edition of Mrs. Jameson's "Characteristics of Women" was also written here. In that Introduction we can detect a touch due to the "wild expedition" just spoken of. "They say," she observes, "that as a savage proves his heroism by displaying in grim array the torn scalps of his enemies, so a woman thinks she proves her virtue by exhibiting the mangled reputations of her friends:" a censure, she adds, which is just, but the propensity, she explains, is wrongly attributed to ill-nature and jealousy. "Ignorance," she proceeds, "is the main cause; ignorance of ourselves and others; and when I have heard any female acquaintance commenting with a spiteful or a sprightly levity on the delinquencies and mistakes of their sex, I have only said to myself, 'They know not what they do.'" "Here, then," the Preface referred to concludes, "I present to women a little elementary manual or introduction to that knowledge of woman, in which they may learn to understand better their own nature; to judge more justly, more gently, more truly of each other;
'And in the silent hour of inward thought To still suspect, yet still revere themselves In lowliness of heart.'"
Mrs. Jameson was unattractive in person at first sight, although, as could scarcely fail to be the case in one so highly endowed, her features, separately considered, were fine and boldly marked. Intellectually, she was an enchantress. Besides an originality and independence of judgment on most subjects, and a facility in generalizing and reducing thought to the form of a neat aphorism, she had a strong and capacious memory, richly furnished with choice things. Her conversation was consequently of the most fascinating kind.
She sang, too, in sweet taste, with a quiet softness, without display. She sketched from nature with great elegance, and designed cleverly. The seven or eight illustrations which appear in the American edition of the "Characteristics," dated at Toronto, are etched by herself, and bear her autograph, "Anna." The same is to be observed of the illustrations in the English edition of her "Commonplace Book of Thoughts, Memories, and Fancies;" and in her larger volumes on various Art-subjects. She had super-eminently beautiful hands, which she always scrupulously guarded from contract with the outer air.
Mrs. Jameson was a connoisseur in "hands," as we gather from her Commonplace Book, just mentioned. She there says: "There are hands of various character; the hand to catch, and the hand to hold; the hand to clasp, and the hand to grasp; the hand that has worked, or could work, and the hand that has never done anything but hold itself out to be kissed, like that of Joanna of Arragon, in Raphael's picture." Her own appeared to belong to the last-named class.
Though the merest trifles, we may record here one or two further personal recollections of Mrs. Jameson; of her appreciation, for example, of a very obvious quotation from Horace, to be appended to a little sketch of her own, representing a child asleep, but in danger from a serpent near; and of her glad acceptance of an out-of-the-way scrap from the "Vanity of Arts and Sciences" of Cornelius Agrippa, which proved the antiquity of charivaries. "Do you not know that the intervention of a lady's hand is requisite to the finish of a young man's education?" was a suggestive question drawn forth by some youthful maladroitness. Another characteristic dictum, "Society is one vast masquerade of manners," is remembered, as having been probably at the time a new idea to ourselves in particular. The irrational conventionalities of society she persistently sought to counteract, by her words on suitable occasions, and by her example, especially in point of dress, which did not conform to the customs in vogue.
Among the local characters relished by Mrs. Jameson in Canada was Mr. Justice Hagerman, who added some of the bluntness of Samuel Johnson to the physique of Charles James Fox. She set a high value on his talents, although we have heard her, at once playfully and graphically, speak of him as "that great mastiff, Hagerman." From Mrs. Jameson we learned that "Gaytay" was a sufficient approximation in English to the pronunciation of "Goethe." She had been intimately acquainted with the poet at Weimar.