Of the latter of those named above, I find another and fuller portrait; see also in the later part of this volume, a letter of date Nov. 9, 1826.
Few men were more highly endowed by nature than Mansergh St. George—rich in the elementary qualities most essential to the formation of the poet, the painter, or the hero; warm affections, a lively imagination, powers of conception equally quick and strong, deep sensibility, undaunted courage, unaffected indifference to the common objects of ambition, and exquisite skill in the transmitting his impressions, either by the pen or pencil. Shakespeare has said that ‘spirits are not finely touched but to fine issues;’ and he is surely right, if we take a future existence into calculation. Did we look to this world alone, we should say the talents of Mansergh St. George were splendid and useless gifts;—‘their memorial is perished with them.’ In fulfilling the duties of his profession as a soldier, he received in the American war a frightful wound, which carried away a portion of the skull; and, though it clouded not the brightness of his intellect, it deprived him of health and vigour, except in those moments of enthusiasm when his body seemed to borrow strength from his mind, moments ever followed by increased debility and depression. He was eccentric, but his singularities were not such as derogated from the respect and affection claimed by his sensibility and genius. He was conscious of them, and sometimes attributed them to a defective system of education, but they were certainly increased by the sedentary and retired life to which ill-health condemned him, and by the attention to his own sensations it enforced.
I find only two or three letters of him who is thus praised among my Mother’s papers; though, doubtless, she must have possessed many more, when meditating this publication. In one, of date Aug. 1792, written soon after the loss of his wife at Clifton, there is a passage which I am well pleased to preserve. ‘I would shake hands with Sir —— ——, but grief communicates with grief like madness, and we are both too apt to dress our sorrows in idle weeds and fumitory. Affliction is a curious thing. Her threatening aspect becomes mild on a near approach. Her snakes become lambent, and lick our wounds. She has an agreeable ugliness. But perhaps I am partial; for we have long been playfellows.... I have suffered the worst; in due time, my present agony will be mellowed into those sweet regrets, that delicious desiderium, the balm which the mind naturally produces for its own cure.’
TO MRS. LEADBEATER.
Oct. 12, 1811.
I am sorry I cannot answer your query about the Duchess of York. I know she has several dogs, but I suspect the number of 170 to be an exaggeration. I remember ten years since hearing Col. ——, a man nicely attentive to his own convenience, lament that eight or ten of them usurped every good place near the fire, and made the drawing-room extremely offensive. She passes for being what is called ‘a good sort of woman;’ person of whom nothing can be cited remarkable enough to merit praise or blame. I was presented to her at her first drawing-room, when her manner was uncommonly gentle, and her appearance pleasing.
How often I have thought of the affecting circumstances of Miss Keatinge’s bequest. It is a most beneficent dispensation of Providence that sickness and sorrow so often prove the seeds of charity and sympathy. In consequence of one pang felt, how often are a thousand relieved or prevented. And as to the sufferers, I believe there is none of us who cannot say, ‘It is good for me that I was in trouble.’ If we perceive that now, how much more clearly shall we see it when in another state of existence, if we are then endowed with a faculty of looking back on those springs of action which gave an impulse to our earthly life.