The street in front of the gallery was crowded with carriages, showing a throng of visiters within; and mounting the imposing steps, (the loftiness of the vestibule dropping plump as I paid my shilling entrance,) I found myself in a hall whose extending lines of pillars ran through the entire length of the building, offering to the eye a truly noble perspective. Off from this hall, to the right and left, lay the galleries of antique and modern paintings, and the latter were crowded with the fair and fashionable mistresses of the equipages without. You will not care to be bothered with criticism on pictures, and mine was a cursory glance—but a delicious, full-length portrait of a noble lady by Grant, whose talent is now making some noise in London, a glorious painting of Van Amburgh among his lions by Edwin Landseer, and a portrait of Miss Pardoe in a Turkish costume with her pretty feet coiled under her on a Persian carpet, by Pickersgill, are among those I remember. I found a great many acquaintances in the gallery; and I was sitting upon a bench with a lady, who pointed out to me a portrait of Lord Lyndhurst in his chancellor’s wig and robes—a very fine picture of a man of sixty or thereabouts. Directly between me and it, as I looked, sidled a person with his back to me, cutting off my view very provokingly. “When this dandy gets out of the way with his eyeglass,” said I, “I shall be able to see the picture.” My friend smiled. “Who do you take the dandy to be?” It was a well formed man, dressed in the top of the fashion with very straight back, curling brown hair, and the look of perhaps thirty years of age. As he passed on and I caught his profile, I saw it was Lord Lyndhurst himself.
I had not seen Taglioni since the first representation of the Sylphide, eight or nine years ago at Paris. Last night I was at the opera, and saw her in La Gitana; and except that her limbs are the least in the world rounder and fuller, she is, in person, absolutely unchanged. I can appreciate now, better than I could then (when opera dancing was new to me,) what it is that gives this divine woman the right to her proud title of La Déesse de la Danse. It is easy for the Ellslers and Augusta, and others who are said to be only second to her, to copy her flying steps, and even to produce by elasticity of limb, the beautiful effect of touching the earth, like a thing afloat, without being indebted to it for the rebound. But Taglioni alone finishes the step, or the pirouette, or the arrowy bound over the scene, as calmly, as accurately, as faultlessly, as she begins it. She floats out of a pirouette as if instead of being made giddy, she had been lulled by it into a smiling and child-like dream, and instead of trying herself and her a plomb (as is seen all other dancers, by their effort to recover composure,) it had been the moment when she had rallied and been refreshed. The smile, so expressive of enjoyment in her own grace, which steals over Taglioni’s lips when she closes a difficult step, seems communicated in an indefinable languor, to her limbs. You cannot fancy her fatigued when, with her peculiar softness of motion, she courtesies to the applause of an enchanted audience, and walks lightly away. You are never apprehensive that she has undertaken too much. You never detect as you do in all other dancers, defects slurred over adroitly and movements that, from their anticipating the music of the ballet, are known by the critical eye to cover some flaw in the step, from giddiness or loss of balance. But oh what a new relation bears the music to the dance, when this spirit of grace replaces her companions in the ballet! Whether the motion seems born of the music, or the music floats out of her dreamy motion, the enchanted gazer might be almost embarrassed to know.
In the new ballet of La Gitana, the music is based upon the Mazurka. The story is the old one of the child of a grandee of Spain, stolen by gipsies, and recovered by chance in Russia. The gradual stealing over her of music she had heard in her childhood was the finest piece of pantomimic acting I ever saw. But there is one dance, the Cachucha, introduced at the close of the ballet, in which Taglioni has enchanted the world anew. It could only be done by herself; for there is a succession of flying movements expressive of alarm, in the midst of which she alights and stands poised upon the points of her feet, with a look over her shoulder of fierté and animation possible to no other face, I think, in the world. It was like a deer standing with expanded nostril and neck uplifted to its loftiest height, at the first scent of his pursuers in the breeze. It was the very soul of swiftness embodied in a look! How can I describe it to you?
My last eight hours have been spent between Bedlam and the opera—one of those antipodal contrasts of which London life affords so many. Thanks to God, and to the Howards who have arizen in our time, a madhouse is no longer the heart-rending scene that it used to be; and Bedlam, though a place of melancholy imprisonment, is as cheering a spectacle to the humane as imprisonment can be made by care and kindness. Of the three hundred persons who are inmates of its wards, the greater part seemed quiet and content, some playing at ball in the spacious court-yards, some lying on the grass, and some working voluntarily at a kind of wheel arranged for raising water to their rooms.
On the end of a bench in one of the courts, quite apart from the other patients, sat the youth who came up two hundred miles from the country to marry the queen! You will remember the story of his forcing himself into Buckingham palace. He was a stout, sandy-haired, sad-looking young man, of perhaps twenty-four; and with his arms crossed, and his eyes on the ground, he sat like a statue, never moving even an eyelash while we were there. There was a very gentlemanlike man working at the waterwheel, or rather walking round with his hand on the bar, in a gait that would have suited the most finished exquisite of a drawing-room—Mr. Davis, who shot (I think) at Lord Londonderry. Then in an upper room we saw the Captain Brown who shook his fist in the queen’s face when she went to the city—really a most officer-like and handsome fellow; and in the next room poor old Hatfield who shot at George the Third, and has been in Bedlam for forty years—quite sane! He was a gallant dragoon, and his face is seamed with scars got in battle before his crime. He employs himself with writing poetry on the death of his birds and cats whom he has outlived in prison—all the society he has had in this long and weary imprisonment. He received us very courteously; and called our attention to his favorite canary, showed us his poetry, and all with a sad, mild, subdued resignation that quite moved me.
In the female wards I saw nothing very striking, except one very noble-looking woman who was standing at her grated window, entirely absorbed in reading the Bible. Her face expressed the most heart-rending melancholy I had ever witnessed. She has been for years under the terrible belief that she has committed “the unpardonable sin,” and though quiet all the day, her agony at night becomes horrible. What a comment on a much practiced mode of preaching the mild and forgiving religion of our Savior!
As I was leaving one of the wards, a young woman of nineteen or twenty came up to me with a very polite courtesy and said, “Will you be so kind as to have me released from this dreadful place?” “I am afraid I can not,” said I. “Then,” she replied laying her hand on my arm, with a most appealing earnestness, “perhaps you will on Monday—you know I’ve nothing to pack!” The matron here interposed, and led her away, but she kept her eyes on us till the door closed. She was confined there for the murder of her child.
We visited the kitchens, wash-houses, bakery, &c., &c.—all clean, orderly, and admirable, and left our names on the visitors’ book, quite of the opinion of a Frenchman who was there just before us, and who had written under his own name this expressive praise:—“J’ai visite certains palais moins beaux et moins bien entretenus que cette maison de la folie.”