TO RICHARD TRENCH, ESQ.
London, April 29, 1809.
I dined at the Grattans with Catalani and her husband. They spoiled the party, as professors always do, when made of the company; and Valabrègue got a convenient colique; and they went off as soon as he came up from dinner, without her singing. She did not choose to open her mouth for fine speeches, and a good dinner, as was expected; and to prove that Mrs. Grattan might subscribe and come to the concerts of Catalani, they said at dinner that vingt estropiés s’y faisoient porter both in London and Bath, also in Dublin. It was a curious day. She is coarse in person and manner in private; nay, even in voice, which is extraordinary. He is presumption and impudence double-distilled.
Lady —— is really a firebrand. I hear the two younger brothers of her husband are not very cordial, which I can easily conceive with such a person in the family. Her husband does not attempt to make the slightest reply to any insult she offers him, either in his own person or that of his relations. Is this love, philosophy, Christianity, or what? Love, I think, though it bears much violence and passion from its object, is easily roused to anger by insult, especially before a third person. Philosophy would probably teach a line of conduct that might reclaim by dignified firmness. And Christianity, which says, ‘Wives, submit yourselves to your husbands,’ should, I think, instruct a man to keep his place. ‘Honouring her as the weaker vessel,’ is not allowing her vessel to shove his out of its place, and scatter it in fragments in the dust.
TO THE SAME.
July 7, 1809.
As I always fall on something melancholy when my guardian is absent, I this morning have happened to read a wife’s adieu in Gertrude of Wyoming, and a beautiful passage on the loss of a child in Morehead’s Sermons, which were both particularly calculated to affect me. All Gertrude says of the topics of consolation left to her husband, with the exception of the stanza complaining of her not leaving a child, I beg you to apply to yourself, if ever you happen to want them. The words are few, but so true to nature, that they will suit ours as well as any fancied situation.
Mrs. —— seems an excellent woman, and wholly without background. I have seen few more estimable as a wife and mother, or more easy and safe as an acquaintance. As to friendships, no married woman can really form one. The most she can do is to continue one or two made when single. The intimacies made afterwards may be ‘confederacies in pleasure,’ but nothing more.