Lady —— did not come here for nothing. She has persuaded Lady —— that her country-house—just purchased, after three years’ trial, chiefly to please her, and expensively furnished entirely to please her—is in an air injurious to her health. Really with malicious people distance is one’s only safeguard. There is no muzzling them. This is provoking to an affectionate man. When I see how good sort of women tease their husbands, I am not surprised that so many wise men ‘abstain from that employment.’
TO MRS. TUITE.
London, Feb., 1818.
We have taken a house in Gloucester Place. It has in my eyes but one fault, being too well furnished, filled too much with that knick-knackery I should banish were it mine, and dislike guarding for another. Then I unfortunately saw the lady who possesses it, or rather is possessed by it; and she gave me so many directions about covering it, dusting some chairs under the covers, and scarcely sitting upon others, and watching over the extremities of the unrobed ladies who held the lights, and not suffering the housemaid to touch their projections, and not using leather to the gilding, nor aught save the breezes from the feather-brush, that I was really quite sick of internal decoration, which, like many other species of wealth, is often a plague to the possessor.
I saw your friend, Lady H., to-day. She is just going to bring her daughter into the world. This second birth is sometimes as painful as the first; and when circumstances are not favourable to the wishes of the mother, it is quite a protracted labour.
TO RICHARD TRENCH, ESQ.
Roehampton, March 24, 1818.