LADY HESTER STANHOPE.° THE story of Lady Hester Stanhope's life
might have been one of the most romantic histories imaginable if she herself had not, in addition to many commanding qualities, possessed faults of understanding and temper which inspire the onlooker's ridicule, and faults of heart which inspire his dislike. Romance cannot exist without sympathy, and it is almost impossible to be in sympathy with a creature who constantly alienates the ordinary person by some outburst of half-insane passion or some act of petty and incomprehensible tyranny Glamour is destroyed by the thought that she became so un- pleasant a person to live with that only slaves could endure her temper and her whims.
The facts of her history are romantic enough. Her life began with an unusually stonily childhood, part of which she spent, in accordance with Lord Stanhope's levelling principles, in tending turkeys on a common, and part—accord- ing to her own boastful account—in ruling her brothers and sisters. A proof that she was a match for her father lies in the fact that she had her eldest brother, Lord Mohun, amuggled out of the country and educated at Erlangen against her father's wishes. But the most brilliant as also the best epoch of her life was the period of three years during which she kept house for Mr. Pitt. The real affection which she felt for her uncle seems to have softened her nature, and she -0 warmed, both hands" before the admiration of the 'brilliant society with which she was surrounded. As Dr, Meryon curiously expresses it, " she was caressed for the whole time she was with Mr. Pitt by Royal Dukes, was the friend of Princesses, and perhaps the woman whose society was most courted of any person in London." Unfortunately for her, however, upon Mr. Pitt's death she lost her tyrant's sceptre. She felt her fall bitterly; so bitterly that it appears to have been that, above all things, which made her determine to leave England. In the course of her slow royal progress to the East she and her whole party suffered shipwreck off Rhodes, and it was the loss of her baggage in this disaster which first induced her to adopt Turkish male dress.
The East had the most extraordinary and instant fascina- tion for her. Wherever she lived she must bear rule, and her gradual accretion of power culminated in her crossing the Syrian Desert in a triumphal progress, and being received as "Queen of Palmyra" in a scene worthy of comic opera. Her desert journey had really been an act of con- aiderable daring. Fortunately for her, however, the most extravagant rumours had got abroad :—
"News had got into the desert that an English Princess, who rode upon a mare of forty purses, whose stirrups were of gold, and -to whom the treasurer of the English Sultan told out every day a :thousand sequins, was about to pay a visit to Tudmur; [and] that she had in her possession a book which told her where treasures mere to be found (this book was Wood and Dawkins's plates)."
The consequence of these rumours of her greatness was that the chief of the Anizis, then paramount in that part of the
• (1) Lady Hester Lucy Stanhope: a Nos Light on her Life sad Loss difairs. By Prank Hamel. London: Cassell end Co. [1.5s. net.]—(2) TM Life and Letters of Lads Hester Stanhope. By her Niece, the Duchess of Cleveland. London John Murray. [Es. net.]
desert,- offered her-sate conduct ; and she - performed this perilous journey with a splendour which must have added very considerably toiler prestige.
A period of greatness followed, during which she established herself al the foot of Mount Lebanon, showed the meat humane kindness to fugitives and the oppressed generally, and the most overbearing cruelty to her poor English physician, Dr. Meryon, and cultivated so strong a belief in the occult and in her own prophetic powers that she because absurdly infatuated with the idea of her own holiness. She rarely came out of her house, but received visits from whomever she chose of the distinguished people who came her way. among them Kinglake and Lamartine. She is said to have habitually harangued her visitors upon occult subjects—astrology, magic, the Second Coming of the Messiah, and so forth—for so many hours at a stretch that one at least of her victims was carried out in a swoon.
But unfortunately the notion of her boundless weitlth was false. Her fortune was soon unable to stand the drain of her princely magnificence, and the scandal of her debts at last undermined even her almost supernatural prestige. She died an unhappy old woman deserted by everyone, and was robbed almost before the breath was out of her body by the servants whom she had bullied so unmercifully.
Mr. Frank Hamel has called his book a new light upon her life and love affairs, and he certainly has explained a good deal that the Duchess of Cleveland passed over in her book, and has made the motives which inspired some of Lady Hester's strange movements and acts a little clearer. Though the present volume deals with the hitherto unpublished evidence as to her rather melancholy intrigue with Michael Bruce, it on the whole tends to clear Lady Hester's character. The contro- versial questions as to whether she was mad or sane during her later years, and whether Dr. Meryon was a self-seeking eavesdropper or a chivalrous and devoted servant, are left much where they were; but the volume contains much that is well worth reading.
The Duchess of Cleveland's excellent book, though it has long been known to students of Lady Hester's epoch, is now given to the public for the first time. It is introduced by note from the hand of Lord Rosebei7. The Duchess's account of her pilgrimage to Lady Hester's house at Djoun in 1895 forms a charming conclusion to an agreeably written book.
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