There is no doubt that, by prolonging my stay on Mount Lebanon, I might have been of considerable service to her ladyship. She was about to shut herself up alone, without money, without books, without a soul she could confide in; without a single European, male or female, about her; with winter coming on, beneath roofs certainly no longer waterproof, and that might fall in; with war at her doors, and without any means of defence except in her own undaunted courage; with no one but herself to carry on her correspondence; so that everything conspired to make it an imperative duty to remain with her: yet she would not allow me to do so, and insisted on my departure on an appointed day, declaring it to be her fixed determination to remain immured, as in a tomb, until reparation had been made her for the supposed insult she had received at the hands of the British government.

It would have been expected that the niece of Mr. Pitt, and the grand-daughter of the great Lord Chatham, might have laid claim to some indulgence from those whose influence could help or harm her; and that her peculiar situation in a foreign country, among a people unacquainted with European customs and habits (being left as she was to her own energies to meet the difficulties which encompassed her), might have exempted her from any annoyance, if it did not obtain for her any aid. A woman sixty years old, with impaired health, inhabiting a spot removed many miles from any town, amidst a population whom their own chiefs can hardly keep under control, was no fit object, one would think, for molestation under any circumstances; but, when the services of Lady Hester’s family are put into the scale, it seems wonderful how the representations of interested money-lenders could have had sufficient weight with those who guided the State to induce them to disturb her solitude and retirement. Will it be believed that, when in August, 1838, I took leave of her, the beam of the ceiling of the saloon, in which she ordinarily sat, was propped up by two unsightly spars of wood, for fear the ceiling should fall on her head; and that these deal pillars, very nearly in the rough state in which they had been brought from the North in some Swedish vessel, stood in the centre of the room? Her bed-room was still worse; for there the prop was a rough unplaned trunk of a poplar-tree, cut at the foot of the hill on which her own house stood.

It may be asked whether there were no carpenters or masons in that country? There certainly were both; but, where carriage is effected on the backs of camels and mules and there are no wheeled vehicles whatever, in a sudden emergency (such as the cracking of a beam), resort must be had to the most ready expedient for immediate safety; and, with her resources cramped by the threatened stoppage of her pension, her ladyship could not venture on new-roofing her rooms—a work of time and expense.

The perusal of the narrative which is here submitted to the reader will sufficiently account for Lady Hester’s debts, and the most cursory visit to her habitation at Jôon (or Djoun, as the French write it) would have proved to anybody that the money which she had borrowed was never expended on her own comforts:—a tradesman’s wife in London had ten times as many. Having no other servants but peasants, although trained by herself, she could scarcely be said to have been waited on; and a tolerable idea may be formed of their customary service, when an eyewitness can say that he has seen a maid ladling water out of a cistern with the warming-pan, and a black slave putting the teapot on the table, holding it by the spout, and the spout only.

But these were trifles, in comparison with the destruction and pilfering common to the negresses and peasant girls; and so little possibility was there of keeping any article of furniture or apparel for its destined purpose, that, after many years of ineffectual trouble, she, who was once, in her attire, the ornament of a court, might now be said to be worse clad than a still-room maid in her father’s house. Her ladyship slept on a mattress, on planks upheld by trestles, and the carpeting of her bed-room was of felt. She proclaimed herself, with much cheerfulness, a philosopher; and, so far as self-denial went, in regard to personal sumptuousness, her assertion was completely borne out in garb and furniture. How far she deserved that title, upon the higher grounds of speculative science and the extraordinary range of her understanding, let those say who have shared with the writer in the profound impression which her conversation always left on the minds of her hearers.

Peace be with her remains, and honour to her memory! A surer friend, a more frank and generous enemy, never trod the earth. “Show me where the poor and needy are,” she would say, “and let the rich shift for themselves!” As free from hypocrisy as the purest diamond from stain, she pursued her steady way, unaffected by the ridiculous reports that were spread about her by travellers, either malicious or misinformed, and not to be deterred from her noble, though somewhat Quixotic enterprises, by ridicule or abuse, by threats or opposition.

I take this opportunity of thanking the Chevalier Henry Guys, French Consul at Aleppo, for the communication he so liberally made me of the correspondence between Lady Hester Stanhope and himself, and from which I have selected such letters as bore on the subjects noticed in the diary. The reader will form the best estimate of that gentleman’s merits from a perusal of them.

The Author.

London, June 18, 1845.

CONTENTS
OF
THE FIRST VOLUME.