When mentioning this, her ladyship added: “Doctor, at twenty, my complexion was like alabaster; and, at five paces’ distance, the sharpest eye could not discover my pearl necklace from my skin: my lips were of such a beautiful carnation, that, without vanity, I can assure you very few women had the like. A dark blue shade under the eyes, and the blue veins that were observable through the transparent skin, heightened the brilliancy of my features. Nor were the roses wanting in my cheeks; and to all this was added a permanency in my looks that fatigue of no sort could impair.”
I am now writing when disappointments and sickness have undermined her health, and when she has reached her 54th year. Her complexion had now assumed a yellow tint, but her hands were still exceedingly fair, and she had the very common though pardonable fault of often contriving to show them. There were moments when her countenance had still something very beautiful about it. Her mouth manifested an extraordinary degree of sweetness, and her eyes much mildness.
She never would have her likeness taken, when in the bloom of her beauty, and it is not probable it can be ever done now. There is a sort of resemblance between her and Mr. Pitt, (if I may judge from his portraits.) She has told me also, that she was like the late Duchess of Cumberland. Her head, seen in front, presented a perfect oval, of which the eyes would cover a line drawn through the centre. Her eyebrows were arched and fine, I mean slender; her eyes blue, approaching to gray; her nose, somewhat large, and the distance from the mouth to the chin rather too long. Her cheeks had a remarkably fine contour, as they rounded off towards the neck; so that Mr. Brummell, as has been related, once said to her in a party, “For God’s sake, do take off those earrings, and let us see what is beneath them.” Her figure was tall (I think not far from six feet), rather largely proportioned, and was once very plump, as I have heard her say. Her mien was majestic; her address eminently graceful; in her conversation, when she pleased, she was enchanting; when she meant it, dignified; at all times, eloquent. She was excellent at mimickry, and upon all ranks of life. She had more wit and repartee, perhaps, than falls to the lot of most women. Her knowledge of human nature was most profound, and she could turn that knowledge to account to its utmost extent, and in the minutest trifles. She was courageous, morally and physically so; undaunted, and proud as Lucifer.
She never read in any book more than a few pages, and there were few works that she praised when she looked them over. History she despised, considering it all a farce: because, she said, she had seen so many histories of her time, which she found to be lies from beginning to end, that she could not believe in one. She had a great facility of expression, and, on some occasions, introduced old proverbs with wonderful appositeness. Conversation never flagged in her company. But to return to Lady Hester’s own account of herself.
“I can recollect, when I was ten or twelve years old, going to Hastings’s trial. My garter, somehow, came off, and was picked up by Lord Grey, then a young man. At this hour, as if it were before me in a picture, I can see his handsome but very pale face, his broad forehead; his corbeau coat, with cut-steel buttons; his white satin waistcoat and breeches, and the buckles in his shoes. He saw from whom the garter fell, but, observing my confusion, did not wish to increase it, and with infinite delicacy gave the garter to the person who sat there to serve tea and coffee.
“The first person I ever danced with was Sir Gilbert Heathcote.
“When I was young, I was never what you call handsome, but brilliant. My teeth were brilliant, my complexion brilliant, my language—ah! there it was—something striking and original, that caught everybody’s attention. I remember, when I was living with Mr. Pitt, that, one morning after a party, he said to me, ‘Really, Hester, Lord Hertford’ (the father of the late lord, and a man of high pretensions for his courtly manners) ‘paid you so many compliments about your looks last night, that you might well be proud of them.’—‘Not at all,’ answered I: ‘he is deceived, if he thinks I am handsome, for I know I am not. If you were to take every feature in my face, and put them, one by one, on the table, there is not a single one would bear examination. The only thing is that, put together and lighted up, they look well enough. It is homogeneous ugliness, and nothing more.’
“Mr. Pitt used to say to me, ‘Hester, what sort of a being are you? We shall see, some day, wings spring out of your shoulders; for there are moments when you hardly seem to walk the earth.’ There was a man who had known me well for fifteen years, and he told me, one day, that he had tried a long time to make me out, but he did not know whether I was a devil or an angel. There have been men who have been intimate with me, and to whom, in point of passion, I was no more than that milk-jug” (pointing to one on the table); “and there have been others who would go through fire for me. But all this depends on the star of a person.
“Mr. Pitt declared that it was impossible for him to say whether I was most happy in the vortex of pleasure, in absolute solitude, or in the midst of politics; for he had seen me in all three; and, with all his penetration, he did not know where I seemed most at home. Bouverie used to say to me, when I lived at Chevening, ‘I know you like this kind of life; it seems to suit you.’ And so it did: but why did I quit home? Because of my brothers and sisters, and for my father’s sake. I foresaw that my sisters would be reduced to poverty if I did not assist them; and, though people said to me, ‘Let their husbands get on by themselves; they are capable of making their own way,’ I saw they could not, and I set about providing for them. As for my father, he thought that, in joining those democrats, he always kept aloof from treason. But he did not know how many desperate characters there were, who, like C——, for example, only waited for a revolution, and were always plotting mischief. I thought, therefore, it was better to be where I should have Mr. Pitt by my side to help me, should he get into great difficulty. Why, they almost took Joyce out of bed in my father’s house; and when my father went to town, there were those who watched him; and the mob attacked his house, so that he was obliged to make his escape by the leads, and slip out the back way. Joyce was getting up in the morning, and was just blowing his nose, as people do the moment before they come down to breakfast, when a single knock came to the door, and in bolted two officers with a warrant, and took him off without even my father’s knowledge. Then, were not Lord Thanet, Ferguson, and some more of them thrown into gaol? and I said, ‘If my father has not a prop somewhere, he will share the same fate;’ and this was one of the reasons why I went to live with Mr. Pitt. Mr. Pitt used to say that Tom Paine was quite in the right; but then he would add, ‘What am I to do? If the country is overrun with all these men, full of vice and folly, I cannot exterminate them. It would be very well, to be sure, if everybody had sense enough to act as they ought; but, as things are, if I were to encourage Tom Paine’s opinions, we should have a bloody revolution; and, after all, matters would return pretty much as they were.’ But I always asked, ‘What do these men want? They will destroy what we have got, without giving us anything else in its place. Let them give us something good before they rob us of what we have. As for systems of equality, everybody is not a Tom Paine. Tom Paine was a clever man, and not one of your hugger-mugger people, who have one day one set of ideas, and another set the next, and never know what they mean.’
“I am an aristocrat, and I make a boast of it. We shall see what will come of people’s conundrums about equality. I hate a pack of dirty Jacobins, that only want to get people out of a good place to get into it themselves. Horne Tooke always liked me, with all my aristocratical principles, because he said he knew what I meant.