An Aristocratic Old Maid
As a moral ambition contentment is dead. It is now synony- mous with " goodness " only in a baby. It is not easy to say id what date the virtue was first missed from the moral treasury of the grown-ups, but in the eighteenth and even in the beginning of the nineteenth century, it was conspicuous there. - Earlier than that Bunyan had prayed for contentment as a means to salvation. Miss Austen took a lower ground, but her novels are full of its praises ; Miss Edgeworth cultivated contentment to the point of hardness ; and as to Scott's friend, Lady Louisa Stuart, she bore the wounds of fortune in as determined a spirit of content as did Elinor Dashwood, whose charm she rivals. Neither of these ladies were stoics. Both occasionally emitted a groan when things went too badly with them. Elinor—just once—confronts the selfish sensibility of her sister with the story of her own broken heart, and Lady Louisa, still grinning bravely while she bears it, cries : " Fye upon Cupid ! The nasty little devil has used me always ill." The man whom she loved, her father would not allow her to marry, and the friends who later on, attracted by her wit and companionable sympathy, suggested matrimony she for one reason or another felt unable to accept.
Born in 1757, the youngest of Lord Bute's eleven children, a grand-daughter of the Duke of Argyll on one side and of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu on the other, as a child she was much overshadowed by her elder brothers and sisters, who snubbed and checked her at every turn. At the time of her father's political downfall she was a little girl and shared for years his political exile at Luton ; while her mother, whom she adored, passed muds of her time in London with older daughters, whose settlements were matters of more immediate anxiety. The ex-Prime Minister was subject to " the vapours." Small wonder, seeing what he had put up with both from the King and the mob. Latterly he was unable to go about London unaccompanied by "a dozen prize-fighters from the Bear Gardens." His nerves were broken and his gloom became very oppressive to his children. " Dawdling to the farm " and " strolling to the flower garden " was dull work. The visits of elder brothers failed to enliven the scene, as the paternal "vapours" effectively quenched their spirits.
As for so many old maids, life improved as time went on. The dramatic infusion which keeps sweet the bulk of humdrum existence began to act as a stimulant upon the literary element in her blood, and she tasted the sheer delight of observation. The pleasures of friendship also increased, reaching their highest point after she met Sir Walter Scott. The pleasures of the pen, too, became very real to her. Her letters are charming ; her character sketching should have made her a novelist ; while her recollections of her mother's recollections must have glorified and enlarged her own dull past to an extent impossible to anyone not belonging to the governing class. Social life in those days allowed more freedom to a single woman after her youth than one is apt to imagine. Her house in Gloucester Place was full of friends and resounded with agreeable gossip. It was her own fault if to certain already old-fashioned prejudices she remained in bondage. She would not let her literary work, of which Scott thought so much, see the light ; though she yielded to the pressure of her nephews so far as to contribute " Introductory Anecdotes " to the life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. She felt a literary publicity to be beneath her, something to be avoided by people " of ones own sort " and unless in the case of genius she drew back from the attractions of literary society. " Liter- a-pudding " she called it—the phrase seems to have been coined as a family joke and to have traced back to Lady Cecilia Johnstone, who loved soldiers. Again she did not avoid the traditional error of believing the new generation inferior to the last. She is a little frightened to find herself at close quarters with them. Her niece wishes to be her travelling companion as far as Edinburgh : she hopes the plan may not materialize ; she would always rather travel alone—or at least not in company with " one so governing." Will the girl like her " twaddling way of travelling ? " She always feels when they are together that Mary" is the woman of the world and she herself the " little young girl." " Mary " is so rough of speech and movement and so completely inde-
pendent. She makes her think of a " postillion." But that is the way with these new young people. The young men, too, have lost all distinction of manners. If they would put a little powder on their " thin nasty yellow or red " or " greasy black " hair they would at least look less like ploughmen ! It is true that the greatest feminine friend of her latter years was Louisa Clinton, who from a girl was devoted to the ageing Lady Louisa. The gulf fixed between the generations was bridged in this instance, but it was from the side of youth that the bridge was thrown which enabled the two Louisas to hold sweet converse together. • This book, which Mrs. Buchan has so skilfully put together out of precious material, which only she could have laid her hand on, is not everybody's book. It must appeal primarily to a wide cousinhood of Lady Louisa Stuart's blood relations, but also it will appeal to all those lovers of the late eighteenth century, who spend much time in the middle-class drawing- rooms to which Miss Austen introduces them, and who will be greatly amused by sonic analogous glimpses into those higher circles, forever disfigured by Lady Catherine de Burgh.
CECILIA. TOWNSEND.
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