In short, I have rarely known a woman so entirely fascinating as Miss Landon; and this arose mainly from her large sympathy. She was playful with the young, sedate with the old, and considerate and reflective with the middle-aged. She could be tender and she could be severe, prosaic or practical, and essentially of and with whatever party she happened to be among. I remember this faculty once receiving an illustration. She was taking lessons in riding, and had so much pleased the riding-master that at parting he complimented her by saying,—"Well, Madam, we are all born with a genius for something, and yours is for horsemanship."
One of the many writers who mourned her wrote,—"Apart from her literary abilities and literary labors, she was, in every domestic relation of life, honorable, generous, dutiful, self-denying,—zealous, disinterested, and untiring in her friendship."
Her industry was wonderful. She was perpetually at work, although often—nay, generally—with little of physical strength, and sometimes utterly prostrated by illness. Yet the work must be done, as her poems and prose were usually for periodical publications, and a given day of the month it was impossible to postpone.
Poetry she wrote with great ease and rapidity. In one of her letters to Mrs. Hall she says,—"I write poetry with far more ease than I do prose. In prose, I often stop and hesitate for a word; in poetry, never. Poetry always carries me out of myself. I forget everything in the world but the subject that has interested my imagination. It is the most subtile and insinuating of pleasures; but, like all pleasures, it is dearly bought. It is always succeeded by extreme depression of spirits, and an overpowering sense of bodily fatigue." And in one of her letters to me, she observes,—"Writing poetry is like writing one's own native language, and writing prose is like writing in a strange tongue." In fact, she could have improvised admirable verses without hesitation or difficulty.
She married Mr. Maclean, then Governor of the Gold Coast[B],—a man who neither knew, felt, nor estimated her value. He wedded her, I am convinced, only because he was vain of her celebrity; and she married him only because he enabled her to change her name, and to remove from that society in which just then the old and infamous slander had been revived. There was in this case no love, no esteem, no respect,—and there could have been no discharge of duty that was not thankless and irksome.
They were married a fortnight, at least, before the wedding was announced, even to friends. A sad story was some time afterwards circulated,—the truth of which I have no means of knowing,—that Mr. Maclean had been engaged to a lady in Scotland, which engagement he had withdrawn, and that she was in the act of sealing a letter to him when her dress caught fire, and she was burnt to death.
The last time I saw L. E. L. was in Upper Berkeley Street, Connaught Square, on the 27th of June, 1838, soon after her marriage, when she was on the eve of her fatal voyage. A farewell party was given to some of her friends by Mrs. Sheddon, with whom she then boarded,—the Misses Lance having resigned their school. When the proper time arrived, there was a whisper round the table, and, as I was the oldest of her friends present, it fell to my lot to propose her health. I did so with the warmth I felt. The chances were that we should never meet again; and I considered myself free to speak of her in terms such as could not but have gratified any husband,—except the husband she had chosen,—and sought to convey to Maclean's mind the high respect, as well as affection, with which we all regarded her. The reader may imagine the chill that came over the party when Maclean rose to return thanks. He merely said, "If Mrs. Maclean has as many friends as Mr. Hall says she has, I only wonder they allowed her to leave them." One by one the guests rose and departed, with a brief and mournful farewell. Probably not one of them all ever saw her again.
She sailed with her husband for Africa on the 5th of July, 1838. On the 15th of August she landed, and on the 15th of October she was dead!—dying, according to a coroner's jury, "of having incautiously taken a dose of prussic acid."
The circumstances of her death will be forever a mystery; for her husband has since "died and made no sign"; but no one ever heard of her having had this horrible medicine in her possession. Dr. Thomson, who made up her medicine-chest, and who had been her attendant for many years, declared he never prescribed it for her; and it was next to impossible she could have possessed it. To the various rumors that arose out of her death I do not allude. I do not believe she committed suicide; nay, I am sure she did not, although I know she was most wretched in her mournful banishment, most miserable in her changed condition, and that, if her past years had been gloomy, her future was very dark; but I believe that poison in some shape—not from the small vial which it was said was found in her hand—was administered by the African woman who is known to have been her predecessor,—one of those
"Children of the South
With whom revenge is virtue."