TO MRS. LEADBEATER.
Roehampton, Sept. 29, 1821.
I reproach myself for having permitted you to learn by the public papers the misfortune I have suffered in losing my invaluable friend Miss Agar, as I know your kind heart will form a thousand apprehensions as to the effect of such a disruption on my health and spirits. Believe me, my dear friend, that her composure, fortitude, and Christian resignation, have left with her friends the priceless legacy of an example which forbids every undue murmur, every selfish indulgence of grief. ‘Our little life is rounded with a sleep;’ and till that last sleep our character cannot be perfectly understood or completely finished. Hers has stood this test, and her departure reflects back a light on all her preceding days.
Oct. 8.—Lord Clifden feels, and bears, his loss as he ought—a second self, affectionate as a wife, clearsighted to his interests, temporal and eternal, as a sister, observant as a daughter, the tenderest nurse to him in sickness, the most admirable regulator of a family, which moved with the silence, order, and harmony of the spheres—a pleasing, cheerful, and entertaining companion, and as grateful to him for his liberality to her of this world’s goods, as if she had not been deserving of all he could bestow.
TO RICHARD TRENCH, ESQ.
London, Oct. 15, 1821.
Besides ‘that which cometh upon me daily,’ I have been visiting a lovely little being, a soul on the wing, one of —— ——’s nieces, who adorns a death-bed of poverty and privation with the sweetest and most endearing Christian graces. Oh! how his bosom ought to be wrung in comparing her present situation with that she might have been in, had he behaved with common honesty; but wickedness brings its own balm.
Lord Waldegrave’s Memoirs[66] are worth reading, and show an accomplished mind, so habituated to courtly restraint in expressing its thoughts, that attention is needful to find the full meaning of the writer, in the low and gentle tones by which it is communicated.