That not when prize of festal day
Was dealt him by the brightest fair
That e’er wore jewel in her hair,
So highly did his bosom swell
As at that simple, mute, farewell.’”
[[28]] From the time of their first residence at the Cape in the thirties, Juana Smith conformed to the Church of England, and was in consequence disowned by her remaining Spanish relatives.
[[29]] He was really twenty-four, but he seems never to have known his own age. His wife (born 27 March, 1798) was just past fourteen.
[[30]] Her relations are numerous. She was in three sieges of her native city: in one her wounded brother died in her arms. She was educated in a convent, and is a lineal descendant of Ponce de Leon, the Knight of Romance, and certainly she, as a female, inherits all his heroism. Her name, Juana Maria de Los Dolores de Leon, at once gives the idea of Hidalgo consanguinity, and she is of one of the oldest of the notoriously old Spanish, not Moorish, families. After Talavera, when the Duke’s headquarters were at Badajos, and my wife was a child, Colonel Campbell and Lord Fitzroy Somerset were billeted in her sister’s house. That was in the palmy days of their affluence, when they derived a considerable income from their olive groves. These, alas! were all cut down by the unsparing hand of the French, and the sisters’ income seriously reduced. An olive tree requires great care and cultivation, nor does it bear well until twenty or thirty years old.—H.G.S.
[[31]] Vide Duke’s letter, Nov. 23, 1812, to Lord Liverpool, in his Grace’s letter to Marshal Beresford, Oct. 31, “You see what a scrape we have been in, and how well we have got out of it.”—H.G.S.
[[32]] Cope, p. 141.