In the same year, 1859, died Lady Morgan, the novelist, at 76; Leigh Hunt, the poet and littérateur, at 75; Washington Irving, at 77; and Thomas de Quincey, at 76.
Lady Charlotte Bury, the novelist, attained the age of 88, retaining her beauty and conversational accomplishments to the last; she died 1861.
The Dowager Countess of Hardwicke, who died in 1858, in her long life brought points of time together which, at first, seem separated by impassable spaces. She was born in 1763, and was consequently 95 years of age; but her father, the Earl of Balcarres, having been advanced in years at the time of her birth, their two lives extend back to before the beginning of the eighteenth century; and it was strange to hear, in 1858, that a person just dead could speak of her father as having been “out in the Fifteen” (1715) with Lord Derwentwater and Forster, and having been begged off by the great Duke of Marlborough. Yet such was the fact; and not only so, but having been born in 1649, the three lives of grandfather, son, and granddaughter stretched over a period of 200 years; and, when her grandmother was married, Charles II. gave away the bride! When this venerable lady was born, Pitt the younger was 4 years old; Fox, a lad of 14; and Sheridan of 12,—so that they were strictly her contemporaries; Burke was turned of 30; she was 21 years old when Dr. Johnson died, and a well-grown girl when Goldsmith died, so that she might have known them both; and Sir Joshua Reynolds may have painted her, as she was near 30 when he died. All the literature of this century, running back to the birth of Scott and Wordsworth, eight or nine years after her own, was as much hers as ours. She was married and 26 before the French Revolution began; and the whole of the American Revolution must have been within her personal recollection.
Then there was Viscountess Keith, who died at about the same age, 95, and who had been “the plaything often, when a child,” of Johnson, and who received his last blessing on his death-bed. She was the daughter of Mrs. Thrale, and was a link that directly connected us with the Literary Club at its foundation, all the members of which she must have seen, and most of whom she was old enough to know well as a grown-up young lady.
Lady Louisa Stuart, the daughter of the Marquess of Bute, actually remembered her grandmother, Lady Mary Wortley Montague, who died in 1762. She herself died 1851, aged 94, and was the intimate friend of Scott, and one of the few original depositaries of the Waverley secret.
And Mary Berry, aged 89, and her sister Agnes, 88, both died in 1852, having lived in the best of London society for sixty years. For the amusement of these ladies, Horace Walpole wrote his most delightful Reminiscences.
[46]. History of the World, book i. chap. 5.
[47]. Chambers’s Book of Days, vol. i.
[48]. Walcott’s Westminster, p. 238.