PROGRAMME OF MRS. PIOZZI'S CONCERT, 1820
WITH MS. NOTES BY MRS. PENNINGTON AND MARIA BROWN
Her great fête to celebrate her eightieth birthday passed off most successfully. The concert, ball, and supper drew a crowd of over 600 people to the Assembly Rooms on January 27. Her health was proposed by Admiral Sir James Saumarez, and received by the company with three times three. She opened the ball with Sir John Salusbury, dancing, as Mangin remarks, "with astonishing elasticity," but in spite of her exertions the callers next day found her as well, and as mirthful and witty as usual.
Conway was present among the crowd, but in such a state of suffering, mental and physical, as prevented him from enjoying the entertainment himself, or contributing to the enjoyment of others. A letter from Mrs. Pennington dated Sunday, January 30, gives an account of a visit she had paid him the previous day, just before her return to Clifton, when she found him "like 'mobled Hecuba,'[31] hooded up in handkerchiefs and bandages," suffering from what she calls a tumour.
[31] Hamlet, II. ii.
Sunday, 30 Jan. 1820.
My dearest Mrs. Pennington's sweet silver tongue has done our noble blooded, noble minded Friend more good than all my written wisdom. He promises me now explicitly, (and Conway will keep his word,) that he will in all things take your advice. "Kind, charming Lady!" is his expression, "she has bound me to her with ribs of steel." ...
What a world it is! and you, and I, and he all proud of our talents, if we would confess it. Fine folly!
Is it of intellectual powers,
Which time developes, time devours,
Which forty years we may call ours,
That Man is vain?
Of such the Infant shows no sign,
And Childhood dreads the dazzling shine
Of knowledge, bright with rays divine,
As mental pain.
Worse still, when passions bear the sway,
Unbridled Youth brooks no delay,
He drives dull Reason far away,
With scorn avow'd.
For forty years she reigns at most,
Labour and study pay the cost;
Just to be raised, is all our boast,
Above the crowd.
Sickness then fills th' uneasy chair,
Sorrow succeeds, with Pain and Care,
While Faith just keeps us from despair,
Wishing to die.
Till the Farce ends as it began,
Reason deserts the dying man,
And leaves,—to encounter as he can
Eternity.
.... Bessy's increasing illness grieves me. Dr. Gibbes tries to save her from Consumption. We could not call him sooner. She is now cover'd with Blisters, after which come Leeches and James's Powder, with orders to eat nothing at all but—Milk.
The noble blood attributed to Conway evidently refers to a story, mentioned later by Mrs. Pennington, that he was a natural son of one of the Marquis of Hertford's family. He appears to have made an attempt to obtain some acknowledgment of his relationship from his putative father, but without much success; and the failure may have had something to do with his determination to leave England.
King George III died on January 29, six days after the Duke of Kent, and the new king, who was too ill to be present at his father's death-bed, nearly followed him to the grave. He had caught a severe chill, and to relieve the inflammation his medical advisers saw fit to relieve him of 130 ounces of blood, which all but killed him. Yet he was convalescent by February 6.
On February 2 Mrs. Pennington writes: "Your verses, my beloved Friend, are above all praise, for yours they must be, as no one else can delineate such profound thinking with the same ease and perspicuity. The late events do indeed give a grave and solemn tone to one's reflections, and these awful death-bells sounding from every quarter in one's ears, fill me with trembling apprehension for everything that is near and dear to me. I rejoice that George IV was not proclaimed on the anniversary of the Martyrdom of Charles the Ist. To my easily alarmed mind it would have seemed frightfully ominous!...