Penzance, Sunday August 13, 1820.
Come! oh come! dear Mrs. Pennington, I see you half long to be here, and what a relief, what a comfort, would your society afford to your starving H. L. P.? Here is no heat, no dust, no cold: I daresay it is a very negative place, but I must not have you tell tales out of School. Miss Trevenan may justly disapprove my censure on the no picturesque of her native county: and if you read her my letters so, I must grow cautious, à la Conway. I have heard from him, thank God! The rogue told me nothing tho', except how charming you and I were, what admirable letters we wrote, etc. "Yea, and all that did I know before,"[34] as Juliet says. Quere, whether he has anything to tell; unless it be that he has at length calmed his own noble and too-feeling mind, by conduct which himself approves.
But at the same moment with your kind letter comes our long-expected ship. Cook says they have been to Wales; Swansea in Glamorganshire!
The day you receive this one whole month will have elapsed since I left the full moon shining in her brightness on Clifton Terrace. Never have my eyes seen her since. No, nor a starry night. Yet here is sun enough, and the sea so beautifully blue and clear, you would be delighted with it, as one is with a tame Lyon. Will you come?...
Much, meantime, and of much more importance, is crazing all the brain-pans of poor Europe. The revolt at Rome strikes me as very surprising. The same people who defended their Sovereign as long as they could, poor creatures! against French aggression, now fly in the face of his not only Innocent, but innocuous successor: no mortal can guess why. Ay, ay, you used to laugh when I mounted my turnep cart and preached the end of the world. But you don't like witnessing the convulsions that precede it, and which increase in violence visibly every day. Poor Ithaca! whence Ulysses was detained, you know, by the gardens of Alcinous, has been shattered completely to pieces by an earthquake, under the name of St. Mauro; and Inspruck, where I spent a few days, has seen the destruction of her Golden House.
Our Queen Bee, of whom the Radicals have laid hold, will be the instrument of concussion in our Country; and we drones shall suffer, while the stingers go on torturing each other into madness. The Naturalists, Pennant, Linnæus, etc., have long observed that all the Hymenoptera have stings. Yet I suppose that will not deter the hopers from marriage....
Mr. Mangin's Intercepted Letter was a little Pamphlet, censuring some Authors, Actors, etc., commending others; and I got two kind lines, before we were at all acquainted,—so that brought on Library conversation, and he offered his services about the Name-Book;—took it to London for me, where it was rejected, not through any neglect on his part: and I felt myself much obliged by his attentions, and rejoiced in his good fortune when he married....
[34] Rom. and Jul., II. v. 47.
No particulars are forthcoming respecting the "Name Book," but it was evidently a work on Etymology, written some years before, which was to have been called Lyford Redivivus, for which she was unable to find a publisher. A letter in Mr. Broadley's collection indicates that it was finished about 1816, when she writes to Sir James Fellowes, "I wish Mr. Jenkins had taken the Name Book."
Penzance, Saturday Night,
26 Aug. 1820.
Dear, kind Mrs. Pennington, I love you for wishing that you could come, and you ought to love me for agreeing in the notion that to come would be very foolish. One can hardly save the expences of such a journey by cheap fish, when the water 'tis boyl'd in must, every drop, be paid for. And what an ideot was James not to pay the carriage of the Turbot! When I miss'd it in the weekly account I could have cuff'd him.
The heats are equable, not strong or starvy; but little can be said in praise of the weather. Rain, almost incessant, keeps one at home, and to get at this lovely sea, such stinks must be encounter'd as I never knew but at Rome or Naples. Poor, dear Italy! I did love it however, and hear with unaffected sorrow of the pangs that are tearing it to pieces. In France fire-brands seem the instruments of punishment from on high. In England one female suffices. If nothing can be done without more help, my Paper says that Buonaparte is to be let loose, and that Prince Esterhazy's business here was to solicit his liberation. Hissing the Duke of Wellington is a prelude, a pretty overture to such an Opera. Opera means piece of work, you know. It makes me more willing to quit the world certainly, when I see it rolling downhill so. But the whole of it must be discover'd before it is destroy'd, and the little ship William, a trading vessel from Blythe in Northumberland, has in effect found at last the great Southern Continent, so long supposed to exist, so completely forgotten of late years....
Did you ever read my verses, which this discovery made by the William confirms? "No," is the answer, Well then, here they are, making part of a long poem composed 35 years ago.
Where slowly turns the Southern Pole,
And distant Constellations roll,
A sea-girt Continent lies hurl'd,
And keeps the balance of the World.
But felter'd fogs, and hoary frost
Defend th' inhospitable coast,
Which, veil'd from sight, eludes the Pilot's care,
And leaves him fix'd in ice, a statue of despair.
I hear no more of Salusbury. I never could get him to care about these matters: and after all, does not he act as all parents wish their children to act, soberly and quietly, keeping a steady eye to his interest in this world; not, I hope and trust, forgetful of the next. One must love the creatures for their valuable, or delight in them for their shining qualities, no matter whether they love me or no, and in their way they do love me. Sir James Fellowes has written kindly and good-humouredly, and my heart has entirely made all up with his. Nothing, as you say, ail'd him but jealousy; and I hold that to be what foolish Merlin, the mechanic, called a desagreable compliment....
Miss Willoughby has written from St. Anne's Hill. She says Lord Erskine wishes the illustrious Lady, who causes so much talk, was in the Liturgy and out of the Country. After what past at Ephesus, I see not why one should wish any such thing; but the aggregate of understanding she is tried by will decide rightly, I doubt not....
Well, God mend all; and give us a merry meeting on our Happy Return....
The populace had been exasperated with Wellington over the Peterloo incident, and he was just now sharing the unpopularity of the Ministry, of which he was a member, on account of the Bill of Pains and Penalties designed to effect the Queen's divorce. The exclusion of her name from the Church Services had been one of the first objects of the King on his accession.
Miss Willoughby, who soon afterwards followed Mrs. Piozzi to Penzance, appears to have been a daughter of Charles James Fox.
15 Sep. 1820.
I hope my dear Mrs. Pennington is beginning again to look for an empty letter. Empty it must be of all but good will, badly express'd, for we are still-life people here, who see and hear very little, and reflect less upon what is seen and heard. I think every day more and more with our old Master Shakespear, that "there is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune."[35] Caroline of Brunswick has surely miss'd her tide. A commotion might have been raised the first week: I now begin to doubt its possibility on her account. Rebellion however is in, as boys say of Cricket and Kite-flying, and any excuse serves in any country. When what is called a Spirit of Liberty seizes the swarthy inhabitants of Morocco, how should their old enemies, the Portuguese, escape? "When Afric recovers, Mundus will end," says an old proverb. And as dear Mrs. Pennington says, "no matter how soon, it should be either ended or mended." The eclipse however did nothing towards its destruction. I saw it here beautifully, but there was little apparent obscuration, tho' the Thermometer sunk two degrees. We shall have an elegant Eclipse of the Moon on our Equinoctial day, the 22d of September: and our tides become even now a little stronger in their flux and reflux. Like other quiet temper'd people, their anger, I understand is dreadful....
Doctor Randolph's state of health grieves me, and the loss of Mr. Bayntom; on whom so many, (and those wise people too,) depended with a very firm reliance. I always wonder at such partiality. It has been my lot to love three or four Medical Men very sincerely, and like them in earnest for companions and friends, but would not give much of preference to any. And 'tis well that such is my humour, in a place where we send to the Tallow chandler's if we want drugs: no Apothecary or Chymist residing near happy Penzance. Fowls we buy in the feathers—and James says every shop in the Town sells Barley to feed them with. There are no more Poulterers than Milliners yet everybody is genteelly drest, and I warrant our Michælmas goose will be good, and cost us scarce half a crown, giblets and plumage. I should like to write you a letter with my own quill....
Well! now I will go work at your Fly; but even that is nonsense, for I cannot frame it, nor line it, nor put it in a box. There are no frames, no boxes, no linings, at Penzance. I cannot make it worth your acceptance; and who dreams of my living till the spring, and bringing it with me to Clifton, when I shall be going on to 82 years old? I must finish, and leave it in charge with Bessy, to save from the hands of my Executors; as I will do by Conway's portrait....
The Harvest here is beautiful and plenteous:—
"Far as the circling eye can range around
Unbounded, tossing in a flood of corn,"
as Thomson says. Industry is a rough power surely, but a kind one; working that you and I may sit idle, ploughing that H. L. P. may have leisure to work Butterflies, and weaving that pretty Mrs. Balhechet may look lovely in her various dresses.
Charles Shephard has written to me again. He likes the correspondence I suppose, for we are 4000 miles asunder. By dint of industry however, he will come home rich; and seeing 500 people richer than himself, will find he has exchanged honour and distinction for Coffee-house chat and Drawing-room small talk,—the food his fancy now is longing for, but which will grow insipid in six months; and reflection will then inform him that to talk of Rum and Sugar has more spirit and sweetness than to talk of nothing. He begs me to write, not newspaper occurrences, he says, but stuff out of my own head, as they say at Eton School:—the head of an old Haggard, 81 years old!!! But he is consorting with those who never heard tell about the gardens of Alcinous. Some one sung a Ballad in which Lethe was mentioned, not a soul in the company guess'd what was meant, till some very clever fellow found it was a river, running between Leith and Edinburgh....
[35]Timon of Ath., IV. iii. 218.