Each twilight thought, each nascent feeling read,
Which you yourself created."
Alas, that such a beginning should have such an end!
Both these are whole-lengths, by Sir Joshua Reynolds: the middle tints are a little flown, else they were perfect; they suffer by being hung near the glowing yet mellowed tints of Vandyke.
We have here a whole bevy of the heroines of De Grammont, delightful to those who have what Walpole used to call the "De Grammont madness" upon them. Here is that beautiful, audacious termagant, Castlemaine, very like her picture at Windsor, and with the same characteristic bit of storm gleaming in the background.—Lady Denham,[ 76] the wife of the poet, Sir John Denham, and niece of that Lord Bristol who figures in Vandyke's picture above mentioned—a lovely creature, and a sweet picture.—Louise de Querouaille, Duchess of Portsmouth, who so long ruled the heart and councils of Charles the Second, in Lely's finest style; the face has a look of blooming innocence, soon exchanged for coarseness and arrogance.—The indolent, alluring Middleton, looking from under her sleepy eyelids, "trop coquette pour rebuter personne."—"La Belle Hamilton," the lovely prize of the volatile De Grammont; very like her portrait at Windsor, with the same finely formed bust and compressed ruby lips, but with an expression more vivacious and saucy, and less elevated.—Two portraits of Nell Gwyn, with the fair brown air and small bright eyes they ought to have; au reste, with such prim, sanctified mouths, and dressed with such elaborate decency, that instead of reminding us of the "parole sciolte d'ogni freno, risi, vezzi, giuochi"—they are more like Beck Marshall, the puritan's daughter, on her good behaviour.[ 77]
Here is that extraordinary woman Hortense Mancini, Duchess of Mazarin, the fame of whose beauty and gallantries filled all Europe, and once the intended wife of Charles the Second, though she afterwards intrigued in vain for the less (or more) eligible post of maitresse en titre. What an extraordinary, wild, perverted, good-for-nothing, yet interesting set of women, were those four Mancini sisters! all victims, more or less, to the pride, policy, or avarice, of their cardinal uncle; all gifted by nature with the fervid Italian blood and the plotting Italian brain; all really aventuriéres, while they figured as duchesses and princesses. They wore their coronets and ermine as strolling players wear their robes of state—with a sort of picturesque awkwardness—and they proved rather too scanty to cover a multitude of sins.
This head of Hortense Mancini, as Cleopatra dissolving the pearl, is the most spirited, but the least beautiful portrait I have seen of her. An appropriate pendant on the opposite side is her lover, philosopher, and eulogist, the witty St. Evremond—Grammont's "Caton de Normandie;" but instead of looking like a good-natured epicurean, a man "who thought as he liked, and liked what he thought,"[ 78] his nose is here wrinkled up into an expression of the most supercilious scorn, adding to his native ugliness.[ 79] Both these are by Kneller. Farther on, is another of Charles's beauties, whose sagesse has never been disputed—Elizabeth Wriothesley, Countess of Northumberland, the sister of that half saint, half heroine, and all woman—Lady Russell.
There is also a lovely picture of that magnificent brunette, Miss Bagot. "Elle avait," says Hamilton, "ce teint rembruni qui plait tant quand il plait." She married Berkeley Lord Falmouth, a man who, though unprincipled, seems to have loved her; at least, was not long enough her husband to forget to be her lover: he was killed, shortly after his marriage, in the battle of Southwold-bay. This is assuredly one of the most splendid pictures Lely ever painted; and it is, besides, full of character and interest. She holds a cannon-ball in her lap, (only an airy emblematical cannon-ball, for she poises it like a feather,) and the countenance is touched with a sweet expression of melancholy: hence it is plain that she sat for it soon after the death of her first husband, and before her marriage with the witty Earl of Dorset.—Near her hangs another fair piece of witchcraft, "La Belle Jennings," who in her day played with hearts as if they had been billiard balls; and no wonder, considering what things she had to deal with:[ 80] there was a great difference between her vivacity and that of her vivacious sister, the Duchess of Marlborough.—Old Sarah hangs near her. One would think that Kneller, in spite, had watched the moment to take a characteristic likeness, and catch, not the Cynthia, but the Fury of the minute; as for instance, when she cut off her luxuriant tresses, so worshipped by her husband, and flung them in his face; for so she tosses back her disdainful head, and curls her lip like an insolent, pouting, spoiled, grown-up baby. The life of this woman is as fine a lesson on the emptiness of all worldly advantages, boundless wealth, power, fame, beauty, wit, as ever was set forth by moralist or divine.