So it will be seen that kindly Blessington left Marguerite and Alfred to take care of each other this summer time, with Marianne to play gooseberry. Expeditions here, there and everywhere, were the order of the day; drives along the coast, or in the evening down into Naples, to the Chiaja thronged with carriages. There were many English then resident in Naples, among them Sir William Gell, whom D’Orsay once described as “Le brave Gell, protecteur-général des humbugs.” He was evidently a bit of a “character”; a man of learning, withal, who wrote of the topography of Troy and the antiquities of Ithaca; chamberlain to the eccentric Queen Caroline, in whose favour he gave his evidence; an authority on Pompeii—and an amiable man. Mathews speaks of him as “Dear, old, kind, gay Sir William Gell, who, while wheeling himself about the room in his chair, for he was unable to walk a step without help, alternately kept his friends on the broad grin with his whimsical sallies” and talked archæological “shop”; “his hand was as big as a leg of mutton and covered with chalkstones”; nevertheless he could draw with admirable precision.
Greville tells of him, some years later, as living in “his eggshell of a house and pretty garden, which he planted himself ten years ago, and calls it the Boschetto Gellio.” Moore speaks of him as “still a coxcomb, but rather amusing.”
He was a man of sound humour; he could make fun out of his own misfortunes, as in this letter written from Rome in 1824: “I am sitting in my garden, under the shade of my own vines and figs, my dear Lady Blessington, where I have been looking at the people gathering the grapes, which are to produce six barrels of what I suspect will prove very bad wine; and all this sounds very well, till I tell you that I am positively sitting in a wheelbarrow, which I found the only means of conveying my crazy person into the garden. Don’t laugh, Miss Power.”
He was not always respectful to his royal mistress, for he accuses her of being capable of saying, “O trumpery! O Moses!”
Lady Blessington was indeed fortunate in the guides who chaperoned her on her visits to the many interesting places around Naples; Uwins, the painter, escorted her to picture-galleries and museums; so did Westmacott, the sculptor; Herschel, afterward Sir John, accompanied her to the Observatory; Sir William Gell was her cicerone at Pompeii, and to D’Orsay fell the honour of everywhere being by her side.
Pompeii inspired Lady Blessington to verse—
“Lonely city of the dead!
Body whence the soul has fled,
Leaving still upon thy face
Such a mild and pensive grace