TO THE SAME.
Bath, Feb. 20, 1812.
I am just returned from seeing Betty, and greatly disappointed. His figure and face are ignoble, his voice not pleasing, his gesticulations vulgar, and his manner in general high rant. Yet in the last act of The Earl of Essex he showed feeling and a just conception of his part. I know not how he pleased others; as to me, he made no impression, and I never desire to see him again. The pair by my side were as much in a state of performance as he was. There is no love on either part. She wishes to marry him as a bon parti; and he wishes, whether he intends to marry her or not, to make her violently in love with him. In this he fancies he has in part succeeded, and so did I till this evening; but he is much mistaken. I could almost fancy she will carry her point; one is generally safe in deciding for the woman. As we were a quartetto, I thought it right, on quitting the box half an hour before the play was over, to offer to take her home, as it appeared to me unfeminine to leave her shut up in a little cage with him; but she refused me under a very ingenious pretence, and much will depend on the use she makes of that time. She was in a state of high romance and affected suffering; and it was painful to hear on each side the language of high-wrought affection used for selfish or worldly purposes and in a theatrical tone; and also to see love played at like a game of chess, each party advancing and retreating according to a premeditated scheme. She has a thoroughly foreign manner, and admirable French accent, having past much of her life in France; shows great sharpness both of intellect and temper; but patches it over now and then with a sentiment of softness and self-devotion, borrowed from Claire d’Albe, or Malvina, or Corinne. Heaven help him and his daughter, if he marries her!
TO THE SAME.
Bath, Feb. 22, 1812.
No letter from you yet, and it is now a week since I have heard; but I will continue to write, and heap coals of fire on your head. All Bath is much more interested at present in Mrs. Williams’, late Mrs. Bristow’s, dancing than in the change of Ministry. She announced her intention of making up a French country-dance last Thursday, and it attracted several hundreds—partly from the reputation of her beauty and dancing, partly from the singularity of seeing a woman past fifty, and a grandmother, still so handsome, and able to perform in a cotillon. She danced, I hear, not in the theatrical indelicate manner of the present day, but with the flowing gracefulness of the preceding, and is to perform again next Thursday, when a much greater crowd is expected, as those who came to ridicule her stayed to admire, except a few inflexible Bath Cats. I fear I must not venture that evening, as, without going very early, no art or good luck could secure a place where I could see her. Her husband danced in the same dance as her vis-à-vis (which, you know, is not her partner), and performed also remarkably well; but he is a youngish man.
I have wanted you to protect me from a person who has taken possession of me—not a man. She began by humility and falling in love with me and mine—not by admiration, which I know how to resist, but by affection, which I shall never resist; and she ends by exigeance and assumption, and, without being distinguished in any way, by an extraordinary display of vanity, which is always interrupting the common course of things.
I am giving —— —— something very like regular lessons in singing; and I have the vanity to think I have improved her. She has powers, and has had an immensity of instruction; but I think her instructors have made a job of her, and have hid from her, or at least not shown her, some of the simplest principles in singing.