N.—It is a Lady W—: you have heard me speak of her before. She is a person of great sense and spirit, and combines very opposite qualities from a sort of natural strength of character. She has shown the greatest feeling and firmness united: no one can have more tenderness in her domestic connexions, and yet she has borne the loss of some of them with exemplary fortitude. Perhaps, the one is a consequence of the other; for where the attachment or even the regret is left, all is not lost. The mind has still a link to connect it with the beloved object. She has no affectation; and therefore yields to unavoidable circumstances as they arise. Inconsolable grief is often mere cant, and a trick to impose on ourselves and others. People of any real strength of character are seldom affected: those who have not the clue of their own feelings to guide them, do not know what to do, and study only how to produce an effect. I recollect one of the Miss B—s, Lord Orford’s favourites, whom I met with at a party formerly, using the expression—‘That seal of mediocrity, affectation!’ Don’t you think this striking?
H.—Yes; but not quite free from the vice it describes.
N.—Oh! they had plenty of that: they were regular blue-stockings, I assure you; or they would not have been so entirely to his lordship’s taste, who was a mighty coxcomb. But there is none of that in the person I have been speaking of: she has very delightful, genteel, easy manners.
H.—That is the only thing I envy in people in that class.
N.—But you are not to suppose they all have it: it is only those who are born with it, and who would have had it in a less degree in every situation of life. Vulgarity is the growth of courts as well as of the hovel. We may be deceived by a certain artificial or conventional manner in persons of rank and fashion; but they themselves see plainly enough into the natural character. I remember Lady W— told me, as an instance to this purpose, that when she was a girl, she and her sister were introduced at court; and it was then the fashion to stand in a circle, and the Queen came round and spoke to the different persons in turn. There was some high lady who came in after them, and pushed rudely into the circle so as to get before them. But the Queen, who saw the circumstance, went up and spoke to them first, and then passed on (as a just punishment) without taking any notice whatever of the forward intruder. I forget how it arose the other day, but she asked me—‘Pray, Mr. Northcote, is Discretion reckoned one of the cardinal virtues?’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘it is not one of them, for it is all!’ If we had discretion at all times, we should never do wrong: but we are taken off our guard by being thrown into new and difficult situations, and have not time to weigh the consequences or to summon resolution to our aid. That is what Opie used to say when he had been engaged in an argument over-night, what excellent answers he could give the next day—and was vexed with himself for not having thought of them. No! if we had sufficient presence of mind to foresee the consequences of our actions on the spot, we should very rarely have occasion to repent of them afterwards.
H.—You put me in mind of Cicero’s account of the cardinal virtues, in his Offices, who makes them out to be four; and then says they are all referable to the first, which is Prudence.
N.—Ay; do you recollect what they are?
H.—Prudence, Temperance, Justice, and Fortitude.
N.—They are too much alike. The most distinct is Fortitude.
H.—I never could make much of Cicero, except his two treatises on Friendship and Old Age, which are most amiable gossiping. I see that Canning borrowed his tautology from Cicero, who runs on with such expressions as ‘I will bear, I will suffer, I will endure any extremity.’ This is bad enough in the original: it is inexcusable in the copy. Cicero’s style, however, answered to the elegance of his finely-turned features; and in his long, graceful neck you may trace his winding and involuted periods.