Charles Dickens was then in full bloom,—Thackeray in full bud. Sydney Smith exercised his keen, discreet wit. Kenyon not only wrote about pink champagne, but dispensed it with many other good things. Rogers entertained[179] with exquisite taste, and showed his art-treasures without ostentation. Tom Moore, like a veteran canary, chirped, but would not sing. Lord Brougham and the Iron Duke were seen in the House of Lords. Carlyle growled and imbibed strong tea at Chelsea. The Queen was in the favor of her youth, with her handsome husband always at her side. The Duchess of Sutherland, a beautiful woman with lovely daughters, kept her state at Stafford House. Lord Houghton was known as Monckton Milnes. The Honorable Mrs. Norton wore her dark hair folded upon her classic head, beneath a circlet of diamonds. A first season in London was then a bewilderment of brilliancy in reputations, beauties, and entertainments. Margaret did not encounter the season, but hoped to do so at a later day. For the moment she consoled herself thus:—
"I am glad I did not at first see all that pomp and parade of wealth and luxury in contrast with the misery—squalid, agonizing, ruffianly—which stares one in the face in every street of London, and hoots at the gates of her palaces a note more ominous than ever was that of owl or raven in the portentous times when empires and races have crumbled and fallen from inward decay."
Margaret expresses the hope that the social[180] revolution, which to her seemed imminent in England, may be a peaceful one, "which shall destroy nothing except the shocking inhumanity of exclusiveness." She speaks with appreciation of the National and Dulwich Galleries, the British Museum, the Zoölogical Gardens. Among the various establishments of benevolence and reform, she especially mentions a school for poor Italian boys, with which Mazzini had much to do. This illustrious man was already an exile in London, as was the German poet, Freiligrath.
Margaret was an admirer of Joanna Baillie, and considered her and the French Madame Roland as "the best specimens hitherto offered of women of a Roman strength and singleness of mind, adorned by the various culture and capable of the various action opened to them by the progress of the Christian idea."
She thus chronicles her visit to Miss Baillie:
"We found her in her little, calm retreat at Hampstead, surrounded by marks of love and reverence from distinguished and excellent friends. Near her was the sister, older than herself, yet still sprightly and full of active kindness, whose character she has, in one of her last poems, indicated with such a happy mixture of sagacity, humor, and tender pathos, and with so absolute a truth of outline. Although no autograph hunter, I asked for theirs; and when[181] the elder gave hers as 'sister to Joanna Baillie,' it drew a tear from my eye,—a good tear, a genuine pearl, fit homage to that fairest product of the soul of man, humble, disinterested tenderness."
Margaret also visited Miss Berry, the friend of Horace Walpole, long a celebrity, and at that time more than eighty years old. In spite of this, Margaret found her still characterized by the charm, "careless nature or refined art," which had made her a social power once and always.
But of all the notable personages who might have been seen in the London of that time, no one probably interested Margaret so much as did Thomas Carlyle. Her introduction to him was from Mr. Emerson, his friend and correspondent; and it was such as to open to her, more than once, the doors of the retired and reserved house, in which neither time nor money was lavished upon the entertainment of strangers.
Mr. Carlyle's impressions of Margaret have now been given to the world in the published correspondence of Carlyle and Emerson. She had, long before, drawn her portrait of him in one of her letters descriptive of London and its worthies. The candid criticism of both is full of interest, and may here be contrasted. Margaret says:—[182]
"I approached him with more reverence after a little experience of England and Scotland had taught me to appreciate the strength and height of that wall of shams and conventions which he, more than any other man, or thousand men,—indeed, he almost alone,—has begun to throw down. He has torn off the veils from hideous facts; he has burnt away foolish illusions; he has touched the rocks, and they have given forth musical answer. Little more was wanting to begin to construct the city; but that little was wanting, and the work of construction is left to those that come after him. Nay, all attempts of the kind he is the readiest to deride, fearing new shams worse than the old, unable to trust the general action of a thought, and finding no heroic man, no natural king, to represent it and challenge his confidence."