When at Gordon Castle, the duchess occupied herself with pursuits that elevated whilst they refreshed her mind. She promised Doctor Beattie to send him the history of a day. Her day seems to have been partly engaged in the instruction of her five daughters, and in an active correspondence and reading. It is difficult to imagine this busy, flattered woman reading Blair's sermons—which had then been recently published—to her family on Sundays; or the duke, whom Doctor Beattie describes as "more astronomical than ever," engrossed from morning to night in making calculations with Mr. Copland, Professor of Astronomy in Marischal College, Aberdeen. Beattie's letters to the duchess, although too adulatory, were those of a man who respects the understanding of the woman to whom he writes. The following anecdotes, the one relating to Hume, the other to Handel, are in his letters to the Duchess of Gordon, and they cannot be read without interest.
"Mr. Hume was boasting to the doctor (Gregory) that among his disciples he had the honour to reckon many of the fair sex. 'Now tell me,' said the doctor, 'whether, if you had a wife or a daughter, you would wish them to be your disciples? Think well before you answer me; for I assure you that whatever your answer is, I will not conceal it.' Mr. Hume, with a smile and some hesitation, made this reply: 'No; I believe skepticism may be too sturdy a virtue for a woman.' Miss Gregory will certainly remember she has heard her father tell this story."
Again, about Handel:
"I lately heard two anecdotes, which deserve to be put in writing, and which you will be glad to hear. When Handel's 'Messiah' was first performed, the audience were exceedingly struck and affected by the music in general; but when the chorus struck up, 'For the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth,' they were so transported that they all, together with the king (who happened to be present), started up, and remained standing till the chorus ended; and hence it became the fashion in England for the audience to stand while that part of the music is performing. Some days after the first exhibition of the same divine oratorio, Mr. Handel came to pay his respects to Lord Kinnoul, with whom he was particularly acquainted. His lordship, as was natural, paid him some compliments on the noble entertainment which he had lately given the town. 'My lord,' said Handel, 'I should be sorry if I only entertained them—I wish to make them better.'"
Beattie's happiest hours are said to have been passed at Gordon Castle, with those whose tastes, in some respects differing from his own, he contributed to form; whilst he was charmed with the beauty, the wit, the cultivated intellect of the duchess, and he justly appreciated her talents and virtues. Throughout a friendship of years her kindness was unvaried;
"Ne'er ruffled by those cataracts and breaks
Which humour interposed too often makes."
The duchess felt sincerely for poor Beattie's domestic sorrows; for the peculiarities of his wife, whom he designated as "nervous;" for the early death of his son, in whom all the poet's affections were bound up, and to whose welfare every thought of his was directed.
One would gladly take one's impressions of the Duchess of Gordon's character from Beattie, rather than from the pen of political writers, who knew her but as a partisan. The duchess, according to Beattie, was feelingly alive to every fine impulse; demonstrative herself, detesting coldness in others; the life of every party; the consoling friend of every scene of sorrow; a compound of sensibility and vivacity, of strength and softness. This is not the view that the world took of her character. Beattie always quitted Gordon Castle "with sighs and tears." It is much to have added to the transient gleams of happiness enjoyed by so good and so afflicted a man. "I cannot think," he wrote, when under the pressure of dreaded calamity—that of seeing his wife insane; "I am too much agitated and distrait (as Lord Chesterfield would say) to read anything that is not very desultory; I cannot play at cards; I could never learn to smoke; and my musical days are over. My first excursion, if ever I make any, must be to Gordon Castle."
There he found what is indispensable to such a man—congeniality. Amusement was not what he required; it was soothing. It was in the duchess's presence that he wrote the following "Lines to a Pen:"
"Go, and be guided by the brightest eyes,
And to the softest hand thine aid impart;
To trace the fair ideas as they arise,
Warm from the purest, gentlest, noblest heart;"