I cannot resist noting another favourite exclamation of hers, always uttered when any event, serious and unexpected, transpired. On such occasions, she would look piously upwards, and say, “Does it not show how true everything is, my dear?” just as if the whole of the holy Scriptures had suddenly flashed across her mind.
XXXII.
In my earlier days I was intimately acquainted with the Earl of Elgin, whose name is co-immortal with the marbles of ancient Greece. It shows what an amiable man he was to have taken so much notice as he did of a young man so insignificant as myself, and to have introduced me on equal terms to his wife and family.
How fortunate is London to contain the Elgin Marbles and the Raphael Cartoons, which, exclusive of the Venus of Milo, and the Last Supper of Leonardo da Vinci, are of greater worth than all the other sculptures and paintings in Europe.
I knew Lord Elgin in London and Paris; it was when his great diplomatic career was ended. He was a patient sufferer from facial neuralgia, and was under the treatment of Hahnneman. He was unable to speak, for the motion of his lips left a new paroxysm of pain. So he wrote what he would have said, and on one occasion he placed the words on paper that violent as his suffering was it was due no longer to the disease, but to the medicine that was administered. A remedy in homœopathic hands is thought to occupy the disease, and by slightly exaggerating it to effect its cure.
Lord Elgin would have liked to see me one of Hahnneman’s party; he introduced me to the physician. I saw some of the practice, but always left in exactly the same state of mind as I went.
I sometimes joined the family party at dinner in Paris, so I knew Lady Elgin and her two daughters who were then single. I think the eldest was called Lady Charlotte, the youngest was Lady Augusta, who became the wife of Dean Stanley.
The manner and ways of this family were of the simplest; there was not the slightest show of rank in anything they did or said.