TO RICHARD TRENCH, ESQ.
London, April, 1810.
I find myself lonely and low and alarmed and anxious and uncomfortable to an uncommon degree. The strangeness of this house and of all the faces round me, makes me very nervous. Cornwall, you know, wanders round me like something between an old Irish mourner, a troubled spirit, and an undertaker’s assistant. In short, I am miserable, and every forgotten spectre of past sorrow gathers round me. I cannot express to you what I feel at finding myself here to-night with only this melancholy woman. What a witch is Imagination, and how she can darken, as well as brighten, the same groundwork, so as to make it appear perfectly a different picture!
I met an old acquaintance to-day. She told me she would not have known me had she met me anywhere; but added, as a consolation, that I was grown very ‘stout and jolly.’ ‘Stout and jolly;’ charming epithets! But, indeed, I am very indifferent about this. Nobody has gone so far in speaking of my change as the looking-glass; so I am still much in debt to the politeness of my friends.
I was amused by ——’s apprehension of meeting with ‘a careful wife.’ I never found any of the fears my friends entertained relative to their fate in marriage realized. Though the hydra-headed monster of matrimony may have produced to them ‘Gorgons and Chimæras dire,’ these have never been precisely of the kind they apprehended. A notable wife was often troublesome in the last age, when the feudal hospitality and profusion of some families were contrasted in others with a species of narrow bustling husbandry that has long bustled its last, and subsided into the temperate and well-regulated economy of our time; which requires not the sacrifice of more than the daily half-hour, and will amply repay it in a consciousness of utility and of fulfilling the claims made on us by children, friends, servants, the community, and the poor, all of whom must be injured, more or less, by every species of waste.
TO THE SAME.
Dec. 17, 1810.
There is no party at present here except Mr. —— and his wife, who is just the person formed to distress me, by always talking to me of myself and herself—two topics on which a fair easy dialogue is impossible, as I cannot possibly say exactly what I think of either of us. Her compliments to me are very strong, but now such compliments give me pain. Though in the exuberance of youth and spirits I could once bear a powerful light, I am now scorched by what used only to warm me. She is quite miserable at her husband being ‘so stupid a thing’ as a clergyman. I thought this opinion was extinct, and was quite surprised to hear of its revival. I own it appears to me a particularly happy fate, if one likes one’s husband, to have married a clergyman. He is safe not merely from the dangers of a profession, but of a duel, and his wife has un gage de plus for his moral conduct and his leading a domestic stationary life. Add to this an eternal comparison with poor me—my garnets, my shawl, my house in Hampshire, all wished for; and finally, she assured me, when we were alone, she would be very glad we could exchange husbands, that she heard you were very much to be liked, and I should have ——, and welcome. Now, you think I exaggerate, and upon my word I soften the picture. I have written a whole page of gossip. I hope we shall continue to associate but little with those who give materials for it.