This venerable woman amused herself latterly in taming and patronising rats. She kept a vast number of these animals in her pay at Auchans, and they succeeded in her affections to the poets and artists whom she had loved in early life. It does not reflect much credit upon the latter that her ladyship used to complain of never having met with true gratitude except from four-footed animals. She had a panel in the oak wainscot of her dining-room, which she tapped upon and opened at meal-times, when ten or twelve jolly rats came tripping forth and joined her at table. At the word of command, or a signal from her ladyship, they retired again obediently to their native obscurity—a trait of good sense in the character and habits of the animals which, it is hardly necessary to remark, patrons do not always find in two-legged protégés.
Her ladyship died in 1780, at the age of ninety-one, having preserved her stately mien and beautiful complexion to the last. The latter was a mystery of fineness to many ladies not the third of her age. As her secret may be of service to modern beauties, I shall, in kindness to the sex, divulge it. She never used paint, but washed her face periodically with SOW’S MILK! I have seen a portrait, taken in her eighty-first year, in which it is observable that her skin is of exquisite delicacy and tint. Altogether, the countess was a woman of ten thousand!
The jointure-house of this fine old country-gentlewoman—Auchans Castle, a capital specimen of the Scottish manor-house of the seventeenth century, situated near Irvine—is now uninhabited, and the handsome wainscoted rooms in which she entertained Johnson and Boswell are fast hastening to decay. One last trait may now be recorded; in her ladyship’s bedroom at this place was hung a portrait of her sovereign de jure, the ill-starred Charles Edward, so situated as to be the first object which met her sight on awaking in the morning.
[FEMALE DRESSES OF LAST CENTURY.]
Ladies in the last century wore dresses and decorations many of which were of an inconvenient nature; yet no one can deny them the merit of a certain dignity and grace. How fine it must have been to see, as an old gentleman told me he had seen, two hooped ladies moving along the Lawnmarket in a summer evening, and filling up the whole footway with their stately and voluminous persons!
Amongst female articles of attire in those days were calashes, bongraces, capuchins, negligées, stomachers, stays, hoops, lappets, pinners, plaids, fans, busks, rumple-knots, &c., all of them now forgotten.