Then I placed my lips upon Barbara's lips.
Robert C. Meyers.
LADY MORGAN.
With her wit and vanity, poor French and fine clothes, good common sense and warm Irish heart, Lady Morgan was a most entertaining and original character—a spirited, versatile, spunky little woman, whose whole life was a grand social success. She was also one of the most popular and voluminous writers of her day; but, with all her sparkle and dash, ambition and industry, destined in a few generations more to be almost unknown, vanishing down that doleful "back entry" where Time sends so many bright men and women. As the founder of Irish fiction—for the national tales of Ireland begin with her—and the patron of Irish song (she stimulated Lover to write "Rory O'More," and "Kate Kearney" is her own), always laboring for liberty and the interests of her oppressed countrymen, and preserving her name absolutely untouched by scandal through a long and brilliant career, she deserves a place among distinguished women. She evidently had no idea of being forgotten, and completed twenty chapters of autobiography—its florid egotism at once its fault and its charm—besides keeping a diary in later years, and preserving nearly all the letters written to her, and even cards left at her door. But on those cards were the names of Humboldt, Cuvier, Talma and the most celebrated men of that epoch, down to Macaulay, Douglas Jerrold and Edward Everett, while she could count among her intimates the noted men and women of three countries. La Fayette declared he was proud to be her friend; Byron praised her writings, and always expressed regret that he had not made her acquaintance in Italy; Sydney Smith coupled her name with his own as "the two Sydneys;" Leigh Hunt celebrated her in verse; Sir Thomas Lawrence, Ary Scheffer and other famous artists begged for the honor of painting her portrait. Was it strange after all this, and being told for half a century that she was an extraordinarily gifted and fascinating woman, that (being a woman) she should believe it?
She was extremely sensitive in regard to her age, and if forced to state it on the witness-stand would doubtless have whispered it to the judge in a bewitching way, as did a pretty but slightly passé French actress under similar embarrassing circumstances. She pleads: "What has a woman to do with dates—cold, false, erroneous, chronological dates—new style, old style, precession of the equinox, ill-timed calculation of comets long since due at their station and never come? Her poetical idiosyncrasy, calculated by epochs, would make the most natural points of reference in woman's autobiography. Plutarch sets the example of dropping dates in favor of incidents; and an authority more appropriate, Madame de Genlis, who began her own memoirs at eighty, swept through nearly an age of incident and revolution without any reference to vulgar eras signifying nothing (the times themselves out of joint), testifying to the pleasant incidents she recounts and the changes she witnessed. I mean to have none of them!"
Sydney Owenson was born in "ancient ould Dublin" at Christmas: the year is a little uncertain. The encyclopædias say about 1780: 1776 has been suggested as more correct, but we will not pry into so delicate a matter. A charming woman never loses her youth. Doctor Holmes tells us that in travelling over the isthmus of life we do not ride in a private carriage, but in an omnibus—meaning that our ancestors or their traits take the trip with us; and in studying a character it is interesting to note the combinations that from generations back make up the individual. Sydney's father was the child of an ill-assorted marriage. "At a hurling-match long ago the Queen of Beauty, Sydney, granddaughter of Sir Maltby Crofton, lost her heart, like Rosalind, to the victor of the day, Walter McOwen (anglicized Owenson), a young farmer, tall and handsome, graceful and daring, and allowed him to discover that he had 'wrestled well and overthrown more than his enemies.' Result, an elopement and mésalliance never to be forgiven—the husband a jolly, racketing Irish lad, unable to appreciate his high-toned, accomplished wife, a skilful performer on the Irish harp, a poetess and a genius, called by the admiring neighbors 'the Harp of the Valley.'" Their only child, the father of Lady Morgan, was a tolerable actor, of loose morals and tight purse, who could sing a good song or tell a good story, and who was always in debt.
Sydney was a winsome little rogue, quite too much for her precise and stately mother, who was ever holding up as a model a child, in her grave fifty years agone, who had read the Bible through twice before she was five years old, and knitted all the stockings worn by the coachmen! All in vain: Sydney was not fated to die early or figure as a young saint in a Sunday-school memoir. She took a deep interest in chimney-sweeps from observing a den of little imps who swarmed in a cellar near her home, and on one occasion actually scrambled up a burning chimney, followed by this sooty troop. Her pets were numerous, the prime favorite being a cat named Ginger, from her yellow coat. Her mother, who was shocked by Sydney adding to her nightly petition, "God bless Ginger the cat!" did not share this partiality, as is seen in the young lady's first attempt at authorship, which has been preserved:
My dear pussy-cat,
Were I a mouse or a rat,
Sure I never would run off from you,
You're so funny and gay
With your tail when you play,
And no song is so sweet as your mew.
But pray keep in your press,
And don't make a mess,
When you share with your kittens our posset,
For mamma can't abide you,
And I cannot hide you
Unless you keep close in your closet.
Her voice was remarkable, but her father, knowing too well the temptations that beset a public singer, refused to cultivate her talent for music, saying, "If I were to do this, it might induce her some day to go on the stage, and I would prefer to buy her a sieve of black cockles from Ring's End to cry about the streets of Dublin to seeing her the first prima donna of Europe." A genuine talent for music will assert itself in spite of neglect, and one evening at the house of Moore, where with her sister Olivia she listened in tearful enthusiasm to some of his melodies, sung as only the poet could sing them, was an important event in her life. She tells us that after this treat they went home in almost delirious ecstasy, actually forgetting to undress themselves before going to bed. This experience developed a longing to know more of the early Irish ballads, and roused a literary ambition. If the grocer's son could so distinguish himself, she could surely relieve her dear father from his embarrassments; and she began at once to write with this noble object. Her unselfish and unwavering devotion to her rather worthless father is the most attractive and touching point in her character. After her mother's death she was sent to boarding-school, where she studied well, scribbled verses, accomplished herself in dancing, and furnished bright home-letters for her less brilliant mates.