FM.
Upton Court (Vol. iv., p. 315.).
—My friend Miss Mitford gives a most interesting account of Upton Court in the Ladies' Companion for August 1850, which, as I know the place well, I believe to be perfectly correct. A short extract may not be unwelcome:
"Fifty years ago a Catholic priest was the sole inhabitant of this interesting mansion. His friend, the late Mrs. Lenoir, Christopher Smart's daughter, whose books, when taken up, one does not care to put down again, wrote some verses to the great oak. Her nieces, whom I am proud to call my friends, possess many reliques of that lovely Arabella Fermor of whom Pope, in the charming dedication to the most charming of his poems, said that 'the character of Belinda, as it was now managed, resembled her in nothing but beauty.'
"Amongst these reliques are her rosary, and a portrait, taken when she was twelve or thirteen years of age. The face is most interesting: a high, broad forehead; dark eyes, richly fringed and deeply set; a straight nose, pouting lips, and a short chin finely rounded. The dress is dark and graceful, with a little white turned back about the neck and the loose sleeves. Altogether I never saw a more charming girlish portrait, with so much of present beauty and so true a promise of more,—of that order, too, high and intellectual, which great poets love. Her last surviving son died childless in 1769, and the estate passed into another family.
"Yet another interest belongs to Upton; not indeed to the Court, but to the Rectory. Poor Blanco White wrote under that roof his first work, the well-known Doblado's Letters; and the late excellent rector, Mr. Bishop, in common with the no less excellent Lord Holland and Archbishop Whately, remained, through all that tried and alienated other hearts, his fast friend to his last hour."
The portrait of Arabella Fermor is in Reading, purchased at a sale at Upton Court many years ago, when the property changed hands.
JULIA R. BOCKETT.
Southcote Lodge.