TO CHARLES MANNERS ST. GEORGE, ESQ.,
STOCKHOLM.
Elm Lodge, March, 1821.
Your last letter was so cheering I am living on it still. It left a glow in spite of its description of nights two-and-twenty hours in length, and of the pleasures of sliding on ice, and the necessity of being furred up to the tip of the nose; and this warmth will last, I hope, till the arrival of your next. I cannot help wishing that in your next interval of leisure you would give us a little volume. A tale, of which the scene was laid in Sweden, would have novelty for us—a courtship in a traîneau—ministers tumbling in the hay—and then the delights of your polar day—
‘The snow-clad offspring of the sun,
A polar day that knows no night,
Nor sunset, till its summer’s gone,
Its sleepless summer of long light.’
Do you receive the novels of the day? Il faut que ceux qui veulent écrire des romans se dépêchent. Only Walter Scott’s, and those written by persons distinguished some other way, are read; and these are read more in the spirit of criticism and cavil than admiration. While Belzoni is descending into the catacombs, and Parry is penetrating to the pole, while history wears all the attributes of romance, and chemistry all the brilliancy of fiction, few people have patience to follow the adventures of beauties, robbers, and outlaws.
My black seal is for Lady D——. Her cards were out for an assembly, when she died, with very little suffering of mind or body. I am sure the Bath ladies who lost her party, think themselves most to be pitied, and somewhat ill-used.... Ladies are seldom kind to their dames de compagnie. Why is it that, except in motherly and sisterly connexion, women appear so much to dislike each other? As Lady D. seemed disposed to live for ever, being eighty-four, without infirmity, and enjoying all the amusements of youth, in Bath, that Paradise of female longevity, I am sure I wish for my sake she had. I shall miss her kind and laudatory manner to me and mine, her approving peep through her spy-glass, and all her cheerful, good-humoured, civil ways.