Few of Lady Morgan's bon-mots have been preserved, but one is given which shows that she occasionally indulged in a pun. Some one, speaking of a certain bishop who was rather lax in his observance of Lent, said he believed he would eat a horse on Ash-Wednesday. "Very suitable diet," remarked her ladyship, "if it were a fast horse."
The Diary progresses slowly by fitful jerks. Here is a characteristic entry: "April 3, 1834. My journal is gone to the dogs. I am so fussed and fidgeted by my dear, charming world that I cannot write: I forget days and dates. Ouf! Last night, at Lady Stepney's, met the Milmans, Mrs. Norton, Rogers, Sydney Smith and others—among them poor, dear Jane Porter. She told me she was taken for me the other night, and talked to as such by a party of Americans! She is tall, lank and lean and lackadaisical, dressed in the deepest black, with rather a battered black gauze hat and the air of a regular Melpomene. I am the reverse of all this, and without vanity the best-dressed woman wherever I go. Last night I wore a blue satin trimmed fully with magnificent point lace—light-blue velvet hat and feather, with an aigrette of sapphires and diamonds. Voilà! Lord Jeffrey came up to me, and we had such a flirtation! When he comes to Ireland we are to go to Donnybrook Fair together: in short, having cut me down with his tomahawk as a reviewer, he smothers me with roses as a man. I always say of my enemies before we meet, 'Let me at them!'" Of the same soirée she writes again: "There was Miss Jane Porter, looking like a shabby canoness. There was Mrs. Somerville in an astronomical cap. I dashed in in my blue satin and point lace, and showed them how an authoress should dress."
Her conceit was fairly colossal. The reforms in legislation for Ireland were, in her estimation, owing to her novel of Florence Macarthy. She professed to have taught Taglioni the Irish jig: of her toilette, made largely by her own hands, she was comically vain. In The Fraserians, a charming off-hand description of the contributors to that magazine, Lady Morgan is depicted trying on a big, showy bonnet before a mirror with a funny mixture of satisfaction and anxiety as to the effect.
Chorley, the feared and fearless critic of the Athenæum, speaks of Lady Morgan as one of the most peculiar and original literary characters he ever met. After a long and searching analysis he adds: "However free in speech, she never shocked decorum—never had to be appealed or apologized for as a forlorn woman of genius under difficulties."
An American paper, the Boston Literary Gazette, gave a personal description which was not sufficiently flattering, and roused the lady's indignant comments. It dared to state that she was "short, with a broad face, blue, inexpressive eyes, and seemed, if such a thing may be named, about forty years of age." Imagine the sensations this paragraph produced! She at once retorted, exclaiming in mock earnest, "I appeal! I appeal to the Titian of his age and country—I appeal to you, Sir Thomas Lawrence. Would you have painted a short, squat, broad-faced, inexpressive, affected, Frenchified, Greenland-seal-like lady of any age? Would any money have tempted you to profane your immortal pencil, consecrated by Nature to the Graces, by devoting its magic to such a model as this described by the Yankee artist of the Boston Literary? And yet you did paint the picture of this Lapland Venus—this impersonation of a Dublin Bay codfish!... Alas! no one could have said that I was forty then; and this is the cruelest cut of all! Had it been thirty-nine or fifty! Thirty-nine is still under the mark, and fifty so far beyond it, so hopeless; but forty—the critical age, the Rubicon—I cannot, will not, dwell on it. But, O America! land of my devotion and my idolatry! is it from you the blow has come? Let Quarterlys and Blackwoods libel, but the Boston Literary! Et tu Brute!"
In 1837 she received a pension of three hundred pounds a year in recognition of her literary merits. In 1839 she published a book entitled Woman and her Master, as solid and solemn and dull as if our vivacious friend had put herself into a strait-jacket and swallowed a dose of starch and valerian.
The closing chapter of any life must of necessity be sad, friends falling to the grave like autumn leaves. First her beloved husband died, then her darling sister Olivia; and her journal she now calls her "Doomsday Book." Yet in 1850 she thoroughly enjoyed a sharp pen-encounter with Cardinal Wiseman on a statement about St. Peter's chair made in her work on Italy. She writes: "Lots of notes and notices of my letter to Cardinal Wiseman. It has had the run of all the newspapers. The little old woman lives still." December 25, 1858, was her last birthday. She assembled a few old friends at dinner, and did the honors with all the brilliancy of her brightest days. She told a variety of anecdotes with infinite drollery, and after dinner sang a broadly comic song of Father Prout's—
The night before Larry was stretched,
The boys they all paid him a visit.
It was a custom in Ireland to "wake" a man who was to be hung, the night before the execution, so that the poor fellow might enjoy the whiskey drunk in his honor. There was one book more, "positively the last," but she never gave up her pen, "her worn-out stump of a goosequill," until her physician literally took it from her feeble fingers. She had grown old gracefully, showing great kindness to young authors, enduring partial blindness and comparative neglect with true dignity and cheerfulness, her heart always young. She met death patiently and with unfailing courage on the evening of the 16th of April, 1859.
Kate A. Sanborn.