LADY OSBORNE.*
As not many of our readers are likely to know who Lady Osborne was, we will try and compress into a few paragraphs the biogra- phical statements scattered through these two volumes. Her maiden name was Smith, and her father, "like his progenitors for several generations, followed the profession of arms." We learn incidentally that she was born at Rochester, but no particulars are given of her girlish life, and the writer passes at once to the record of her mother's marriage. Sir Thomas Osborne, a wealthy Irish baronet "very far advanced in life," beheld Miss Smith for the first time in a circulating library at Brighton. "He was immensely struck by her appearance, for she was very handsome, and of the Irish type of beauty, or rather colouring,—deep grey eyes, with black lashes and raven hair, well-chiselled Roman nose, and flat, rather low forehead. She was tall, and her figure per- fectly proportioned ; her smile was glorious, and the intonation of her voice sweet and peculiar. Sir Thomas never rested until he not only found out her name and surroundings, but after various repulses succeeded in persuading her to leave family and country and become a naturalized Irishwoman." It is hard to doubt that Miss Smith married for a position and a title, for how otherwise could a beautiful and highly accomplished girl of twenty be induced to leave all that she held dear, and retire with an old man to the dreary solitude of a vast and lonely house, where, as she writes, "my maid and I walk along the long corridor, from room to room, without more fear of interruption from a single being than if we were in the deserts of Arabia ? You could dance thirty couple," she adds, girl-like, "both in the drawing-room and dining-room ;" but then, unhappily, there was no possibility of such a delight, for Sir Thomas had hitherto lived out of society, and made no change for the sake of his beautiful young wife. " 1Ve are some- times," she says, "whole weeks without seeing the face of an acquaintance, and such is the haughty reserve which Sir Thomas keeps up in the neighbourhood that, with a few exceptions (only three, I believe,) I can call on the families once a year, no more, even should they persevere in visiting me." Two children, a boy and a girl, were born to this ill-assorted couple ; but proud as she was of them, especially of the boy, Lady Osborne evidently suffered bitterly from her unnatural position,
• Memorials of the Life and Character of Lady Osborne and some of Her Friends. Edited by her Daughter, Hrs. Osborne. 2 vols. Dublin : Hodges, Foster, and Co. 1870.
and does not conceal it from her friends. "I have no hope," she says, "my only resource is to think as little as possible, and I never allow myself to be a moment unoccupied ;" and in another place she takes credit to herself "for managing so well with a man who, until now, never listened to advice from any human being." Whatever we may think of the wife's taste in writing thus of her husband, who, with all his weaknesses, was evidently devoted to her, or of the daughter's taste in inserting such passages from a confidential correspondence, it must be owned that these early letters are by far the most interesting in the volumes. Her husband died five years after the marriage, and Lady Osborne, whose nerves were so sensitive that she fainted more than once while reading Melnotte, appears to have borne her loss with becoming resignation. Before parting with Sir Thomas, one anecdote, curiously characteristic of Irish character, is worth recording. His name, we are told, was "up through the whole country," and it was quite a saying near Newtown,—" Sir Thomas was a rate gintleman ; if he saw a man driving off his colts along the road [meaning stealing them] he would look the other way." Lady Osborne was doomed before long to suffer a far more bitter bereavement. After two years of widowhood, she had a year's interval of great excitement and gaiety, but of this pleasure- taking time no record is given. All her hopes were centred in her boy, and the little baronet died at eight years of age of whoop- ing-cough. His mother was heart-broken, and gives utterance to her anguish in the most passionate language. What had life to yield her now, what hope had she, except to meet her beloved once again in another world ? The Rev. Henry Woodward, who was, we doubt not, a wise and good clergyman, did his utmost at this time to impart spiritual consolation to the bereaved parent. But when the reader is told by the editor of these memorials that he was "one of the greatest saints and highest intellects that ever graced this earth," the obvious exaggeration of the statement is apt to create an unfavourable impression of a gifted man. Thanks to his ministrations, Lady Osborne was led through sorrow to sub- mission and to spiritual joy, and the correspondence which forms the greater portion of these volumes is devoted to her religious ex- periences or to the letters of Christian friends. Lady Osborne's piety was no doubt thoroughly genuine, but in some instances it trended upon bigotry, and seems generally to have been of a narrow type. She considers that bishops are seldom pious men ; she admits, and the generosity of the admission is noteworthy, that there are pious Protestants even in France ; she declares that nothing on the Protestant side is ever asserted which is not strictly true, while "the opposite party never scruple to assert the most glaring falsehoods."
Those, however, who knew Lady Osborne would, we doubt not, have been more struck by her virtues and acquirements than by her prejudices. She was, to take her daughter's estimate, meek, unselfish, generous, and frank ; she exerted considerable influence over her friends, and among her friends she numbered such men as Sismondi and Archbishop Whately. Her acquirements were considerable,—she had mastered, we are told, eight languages; her memory prodigious,—she would at one time say by heart the whole gospel of St. Luke in Greek, and that Mrs. Osborne should be proud of such a mother does not surprise us. But the publication of these two volumes would surprise us greatly if it were not that this age is pre-eminently distinguished for book-making. The corre- spondence is generally of the most ordinary kind, and it seems unjust to Lady Osborne's memory to expose the common-place letters which she wrote as a wife and mother to the criticism of the public. The editor, without in the least intending it, occa- sionally makes us smile in the notes appended to the correspond- ence, as when she writes of Lord Lytton, who once "belonged to the so-called Liberals, as having quitted the Destructives," and "joined the ranks of those whose very designation bespeaks an. approximation to that state attained at the goal to which all are hastening, no less a one than eternity." We submit this original view of Conservatism to the consideration of Mr. Disraeli.
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