“I have felt very melancholy and ill all this day,” she said.
“Why is that?” Moore asked, doubtless with becoming sympathy in his voice and manner.
“Don’t you know?”
“No.”
“It is the anniversary of my poor Napoleon’s death.”
Joseph Jekyll, who was well known in society as a wit and teller of good stories and to his family as a writer of capital letters, was born in 1754, dying in 1837. It is quite startling to find him writing casually in 1829 of having talked with “Dr” Goldsmith; how close this brings long past times; there are those alive who met D’Orsay, who in turn knew Jekyll, who talked with Goldsmith. Jerdan speaks of Jekyll as having “a somewhat Voltaire-like countenance, and a flexible person and agreeable voice.”
He was a great hand at dining-out, though it distressed him to meet other old folk, whom he unkindly dubbed “Methusalems.”
In November 1821, he writes: “London still dreary enough; but I have dinners with judges and lawyers—nay, yesterday with the divine bit of blue, Lady Blessington and her comical Earl. I made love and Mathews (the elder) was invited to make faces.”
And in the February of the succeeding year, he records another visit to St James’ Square:—