ANNE SEYMOUR DAMER.*
MSS. DABIER was an excellent subject for a biography, and it seems rather a pity that her Life should not have been written by a more accomplished biographer. At the same time, Ms Noble's work has its merits. It is simple and straightforward, perfectly conscientious, refreshingly free from affectation and romance. It has something of the dry clearness of the eighteenth century itself, during which Mrs. Darner made most of her delightful friendship and achieved her fame. But the treatment is bare and obvious. A great deal more, one cannot help feeling, might have been made out of such materials as must exist for a Life of Mrs. Darner; and this in spite of the fact that her own papers and letters were destroyed after her death.
She was one of the best-known women of her time, both as to position in society and as to an artistic taste and talent which rarely, in her day, went beyond merely amateur performances. Her friends were all more or less famous, ranging from Royalty through every rank and every kind of distinction, from David Hume, Lord Nelson, Charles James Fox and other Whig magnates, to the stars of art and the stage. The Miss Berrys were her dearest and most intimate companions ; Horace Walpole, her cousin and faithful friend, left her Strawberry Hill and all its precious contents. She lived there for some years after his death, and then, finding it too great a charge, handed it over intact to the next heir, Lady Waldegrave. The old walla and elms of Twickenham, however, kept a hold upon Mrs. Damer's heart, and her last years were divided between York House and Upper Brook Street, where she died in 1828, a well-known figure in the worlds of art and of society.
Anne Seymour Conway, the daughter of the Hon. Henry Seymour Conway, afterwards Field-Marshal, and his wife Lady Ailesbury, was married very young to the Hon. John Darner, eldest son of Lord Milton,—a barony now extinct. The marriage was unhappy, but not by Mrs. Damer's fault. Her worthless husband committed suicide while still a young man, and from that time, ceasing to be the "flue lady" Lady Sarah Lennox called her, she gave her life to the art she loved—the art of sculpture—her works, chiefly portrait busts, being much admired by her contemporaries. She also travelled a great deal, being high-spirited and fond of adventure. She was one of Napoleon's many English adorers, and during the Hundred Days she paid him a visit in Paris on purpose to present him with one of her favourite works, a marble bust of Fox. In return, the Emperor gave Mrs. Darner the beautiful diamond-studded snuffbox, with an enamel portrait of himself, which she left to the Trustees of the British Museum.
* Anne Seymour Darner: a Wonsan of Art and Fashion, 1748-1888. By Peel Noble. London: Kogan Paul, Trench, and Co. [12e, ed. not-.1
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