THREE GENERATIONS OF ENGLISHWOMEN.* MRS. Ross, the daughter of Lady

Duff Gordon, has proved by the production of these volumes that the ability of the Taylor family, conspicuous for several generations, is not yet extinct. There is comparatively little in the biographies which could have been omitted with advantage, but we would willingly sacrifice some of Mrs. Austin's letters in order to gain a fuller account of Lady Duff Gordon.

Mrs. John Taylor, a handsome and gifted woman, appears to have occupied a conspicuous position among the Unitarians of Norwich, and deserves praise for her plain living and high thinking. She is described as darning her boy's grey worsted stockings while holding her own with Southey, Brougham, or Mackintosh. Her great energy and her inexhaustible resolution in acquiring knowledge were fully shared by her daughter Sarah, whose "extraordinary vigour of mind and body was occasionally almost overpowering." A beautiful and clever • Three Generations of Englishwomen Memoirs and Correspondence of Mrs. John Taylor, Mrs. Sarah Austin, and Lady Dal Gordon. By Janet RMS. 2 vols. London: John Murray.

girl, she was also well educated, though perhaps a little pedantically. A list of books read from her twenty-third to her twenty-ninth year, includes the entire works of Lord Bacon, several volumes of Bentham, Hume's Essays, Macchiavelli,

Bishop Butler's Sermons, Cicero, Tacitus, Blackstone's Com- mentaries,Stewart's Philosophical Essays, and Malthus on Popu-

lation. As a girl, she learnt French, Latin, Italian, and German, —acquisitions which proved of essential service to her in after- years. This stiff reading, we are told, was probably owing to Sarah Taylor's passionate love for John Austin, to whom she became engaged when in her twenty-second year. "I have just seen Sally Taylor," writes Mr. Fox, the Unitarian minister ; "but alas! how changed: from the extreme of display and ffirta- tion, from all that was dazzling, attractive, and imposing, she has become the most demure, reserved, and decorous creature in existence. Mr. Austin has wrought miracles, for which he is blessed by the ladies and cursed by the gentlemen, and wondered at by all. The majority say it is not natural, and cannot last." That it did last there is every indication, and in grappling with her painful circumstances as a married woman, Sarah Austin's courage and patience were taxed to the utmost. Austin, "who was absolutely intolerant of any imperfection," must have been a most provoking man. He is described in Mill's Autobiography as having so high a standard of what ought to be done, "that he not only spoilt much of his work for ordinary use by overlabouring it, but spent so much time and exertion in superfluous study and thought, that when his task ought to have been completed, he had generally worked himself into an illness." Mrs. Austin's own account of her husband is very similar. "My husband gets books," she writes to Guizot, "and exhausts their whole contents, turning every part of his subject over a thousand times in his mind ; but though the head works, the hand is absolutely inert."

And again she says, that if she loses hope and cheerfulness, she gets none from him. He thought himself badly treated, and perhaps he was ; but few men conscious of .great powers

are wholly satisfied with the treatment they receive ; and the reputation he gained by his work on Jurisprudence would have stimulated a more hopeful man to fresh exertions. Austin, however, had no elasticity of temperament, and his pessimism made him helpless. Writing to Guizot in 1857, and referring to her husband's book, Mrs. Austin says :—

"The trials of my life have been numerous, various, and I may say, some of them hard to bear. But all the rest shrink into in- significance compared to the despair of contemplating, day by day and year by year, my husband's resolute neglect or suppression of the talents committed to his care, especially since he was one to whom the ten talents were given."

And after saying that Mr. Murray had applied to him several times, "though with great delicacy," to prepare a second edition, and that he had never touched it, and never will, she adds :—

" You see, dear Sir, how I talk to you of what is most sacred to me on earth. My husband is to me the object of the profoundest veneration and the tenderest pity. He is to me sometimes as a god, sometimes as a sick and wayward child,—an immense, power- ful, and beautiful machine, without the balance-wheel which should keep it going constantly, evenly, and justly."

We have thought it best to anticipate the trial that spread through every portion of Sarah Austin's married life, because it explains how it came to pass that at an early period she found it necessary to become the bread-winner for the family.

Upon the marriage of the Austins, they took rooms in Westminster, next door to James Mill, and close to Jeremy Bentham. Mrs. Austin, by her beauty, liveliness of manner, and assimilative intellect, drew to her house a number of well- known men, who seemed to have admired and loved her. With Lord Jeffrey she was "my brightest and best ;" with Sydney Smith, "dear, fair, and wise ;" while John S. Mill addressed her as " Liebes Miitterlein." Mr. Austin's learning and his great conversational power, when he chose to exercise it, also served to place the husband, and:wife:in a circle of highly educated friends. But it soon became evident that Austin would not succeed at the Bar ; and after his failure, in a com- mercial point of view, as a Professor of Jurisprudence at the London University, the burden of providing for the family rested mainly on Mrs. Austin. The arrival of Lucie, their only child, was another incentive to literary labour. So she began translating works from German and French, and also wrote anonymously for periodicals, saying, with a finical sense of refinement, that she could not bear to have the coarse hands of the daily Press laid upon her. She found some time, in spite of literature, to teach her child Latin, and writes of her, at nine years old, as a monstrous great girl, wild, undisciplined, and independent, who reads everything, composes German verses, and has imagined and put together a fairy world. John Mill doated on the child, and would play with her in Jeremy Bentham's garden. A

strange playground it must have been, for the flower- beds were intersected by threads and tapes to represent the passages of a Panopticon prison. Lucie had the advantage of spending two years with her parents in Germany ; but she

had little regular instruction, and Mrs. Ross states that accomplishments were never attempted.

Translations rarely pay the translators, but Mrs. Austin's skill in that way was remarkable, and she seems to have pre- ferred it to original work. The interest of her biography consists, however, far less in what she did than in what she was, and the most memorable point in her career is the charm that won the affection of men like Bentham and Mackintosh, Guizot and St.-Hilaire, Hallam and Dean Milman. A fortnight before Bentham died, he gave Sarah Austin a ring containing his portrait and some of his hair, and, kissing her affectionately, said,—" There, my dear, it is the only ring I ever gave to a woman." Carlyle, with a youthful glow of enthusiasm, urged her to live near him at Craigenputtock, saying that within a few miles there was a house and garden

to be let, "for almost nothing." Lord Jeffrey writes to her—

he was over sixty, and had the privilege of age—of her deep, grand eyes, and moving lips and great intellect. Hallam wishes to go to Bowood at the same time as she does ; and Guizot says that he loves her, and praises her sympathetic and expansive nature :—" Madame de Stael used to say that the best thing in the world was a serious Frenchman. I turn the compliment, and say that the best thing in the world is an affectionate Englishman. How much more an Englishwoman ! Given equal qualities, a woman is always more charming than a man." That Sarah Austin was charming, seems to have been the universal testimony of her friends. And when active or passive courage was demanded, she showed that she could face danger without a thought of self. While staying at Boulogne, a convict-ship was wrecked upon the sands, and Mrs. Austin saved a woman's life by dashing into the sea and pulling her to land, for which the Royal Humane Society gave her a diploma. "With the extraordinary energy and determination which always distinguished her, she stood the whole night wet through on the beach, receiving the few survivors, and seeing that they were cared for."

In 1836, Mr. Austin was sent to Malta as Royal Commis- sioner to inquire into the grievances of which the natives complained. Mrs. Ross states that her grandmother's personal merits were taken into account in the nomination. She became very popular with the Maltese:—

" Not only," she writes to Mr. Murray, "am I the only English- woman the Maltese ladies will admit on a footing of intimacy in their families (warned and disgusted by the insolence they have met with), but people of all classes talk to me with the utmost freedom."

The cholera broke out, and the most abject terror prevailed. Husbands forsook their wives, and mothers refused to go near their children. Four thousand people died of the complaint on the island :— "For myself," Mrs. Austin 'writes, "I never feared have kept on my course, eating the same, riding in the much- dreaded sereno every evening, bathing in the sea (prohibited most emphatically, I cannot guess why) every day,—in short, altering nothing ; and but for the dreadful heat, I should be perfectly well."

Mrs. Austin's descriptions of people whom she met, and her expressions of opinion, are always interesting. Ranke, who was greatly indebted to her for an admirable translation of his History of the Popes, she describes as small, vivacious, and

a little conceited-looking. "His articulation is bad, his manner not pleasant nor gentlemanlike." Bettina von Arnim is said to have displayed in her conversation gleams of sense and clouds of nonsense, all tumbled out with equally undoubting confidence. Of Carlyle, the friend of her youth, Mrs. Austin writes later on with great bitterness. He is one of the die- solvents of the age ; he is as mischievous as his extravagances will let him be. Of Mill, in 1866 she writes that "he shows his attachment to the people by the artifices of a demagogue. His has been a fall indeed !" Mr. Bright and Cobden, in Mrs. Austin's judgment, are "profoundly ignorant, and can only destroy." Sir Robert Peel is "the most precious of England's sons," and Lord Palmerston "an insolent and malignant man." Like her mother, who upon the fall of the Bastille danced round the tree of liberty with Dr. Parr, Mrs. Austin was an ardent politician, and as a good hater may be compared to Dr. Johnson. At the same time, woman-like, she has the warmest praise for those she loves, and her affection for "that angel" the Duchess of Orleans, whose loss she deeply mourned, for Cousin, with whom she had corresponded for forty years, for her "dear master," Dr. Whewell, for Guizot and St.-Hilaire, is expressed with generous enthusiasm. There can be no doubt that Sarah Austin possessed one of the greatest gifts either man or woman can enjoy,—the power of attaching friends ; and it also seems evident that the best part of her intellect and character was displayed in this contact with others, and is not to be looked for in her books, clever as some of these are.

Lady Duff Gordon inherited to the full, and perhaps in an exaggerated form, her mother's independence of character ; and her influence over others was equally remarkable. She was a lonely child, and made friends with flowers and with animals. When at Boulogne, the little girl sat next to Heine at the table d'hae :—

"'When you go back to England,' he said, you can tell your friends that you have seen Heinrich Heine l' I replied, 'And who is Heinrich Heine ?' He laughed heartily, and took no offence at my ignorance, and we used to lounge on the end of the pier together, where he told me stories in which fish, mermaids, water- sprites, and a very funny old French fiddler with a poodle were mixed up in the most fanciful manner, sometimes humorous, and very often pathetic."

Later on, when the little Lucie had grown into a beautiful woman, she visited, as our readers will remember, the wonder- ful poet on his death-bed, and we know few things in the sad

stories of the death of poets more touching than Lady Duff Gordon's narrative of her last interviews with "poor Heine." At fifteen, the girl was sent, much against her will, to a boarding-school at Bromley, to be "dragooned" by a Miss Shepherd. The discipline of a school was not to her taste, but she told her mother's friend, Mrs. Grote, that she liked her " convent " very much. Lucie had been brought up among Unitarians, and was a little indignant with a young friend for her intolerance in refusing to them the name of Christians. "Our opinions," she wrote, "are entirely oppo- site." But not long afterwards, on visiting her friend's family at Hastings, she resolved to be baptised as a member of the Church of England, an act which brought a "sarcastic, cutting letter" from Mrs. Grote. There are some interesting recollections of Lucie Austin at this time, by a member of the Hastings family, then a little girl :—

"She had a tame snake, and used to carry her pet about with her, wound round her arm (inside the large baggy sleeves that were then the fashion), and it would put its slender head out at the wristhole, and lap milk out of the palm of her hand with its little forked tongue. It was as fond of glittering things as Lucie herself, and when she took her many rings off her fingers and placed them on different -parts of the table, it would go about collecting them, stringing them on its little body, and finally tying itself into a tight knot, so that the rings could not be re- covered till it chose to untie itself again When my sister Catherine was to be christened, Lucie thought she would like to be christened at the same time. Her mother, who was one of the famous Unitarian Taylors of Norwich, had, of course, never thought of such a thing, but when, at my father's sugges- tion, she wrote to ask her parents' leave first, Mrs. Austin wrote back that she was welcome to do as she liked in that matter, and I remember well the curious scene of our good old rector, Mr. Foyster, in a highly nervous state performing the ceremony to the baby in arms and the magnificent lady of eighteen, in the ugly old church of St. Clement."

Then came Lucie's engagement to Sir Alexander Duff Gordon, a very handsome man, who used to come to Hastings for weeks at a time, and "walk about with her wound up in one plaid :"—

" One day Sir Alexander said to her,—' Miss Austin, do you know people say we are going to be married ?' She was annoyed at being talked about, and hurt at his brusque way of mentioning it ; but just as she was going to give a sharp answer, he added,— ' Shall we make it true ?' She replied, with characteristic straight- forwardness, by the monosyllable 'Yes,' and so they were engaged."

The marriage took place at Kensington, and to her home in

Queen Square, Westminster, Lady Duff Gordon attracted some of the most distinguished men of the day, among whom were Guizot and Ranke, Tennyson, Thackemy, and Dickens. Among other visitors, Prince Louis Napoleon came one day to dinner unexpectedly, and a black boy whom Lady Duff Gordon had be- friended gravely said :—" Please, my lady, I ran out and bought twopennyworth of sprats for the Prince, for the honour of the house." Few women, perhaps, have been better fitted to enjoy life and to adorn it than Lady Duff Gordon ; but her health gave way at an early period, and she writes of looking thin, ill, and old at thirty. For a time she found much benefit from the air of Esher, and of the "dear old house" there, Mrs. Ross has many a pleasant memory. This happy period did not last long ; and at length she was sent to the Cape, and narrowly escaped shipwreck on the voyage. The change proved only of temporary benefit, and Lady Duff Gordon was sent to Egypt.

Her published Letters show how well her time was spent there. One brief visit to England was made in 1863; and again she

returned to Egypt, taking up her lonely residence at Thebes, where she studied Arabic, attended to the wants of the people, and won their hearts by her womanly sympathy. She attended

their funerals and marriage feasts. "She had become Sitti Betaana, Our own Lady,' and one corner of her brown abbaieh (cloak) was faded with much kissing." "We die alone," said Pascal ; and this was literally true of Lady Duff Gordon :— "A. last farewell," Mrs. Ross writes, "came to my father from Cairo ; and just ELS we were starting for Egypt he received the news of her death on July 14th, 1869, by a telegram written by her- self the day before she died. Those who remember her in her youth and beauty before disease had altered the pale, heroic face, and bowed the slight, stately figure, will not wonder at the Spartan firmness which enabled her to pen that last farewell so firmly."