LADY DOROTHY NEVILL.*
BORN four years before the end of George IV.'s reign, Lady Dorothy Nevill, daughter of the third Earl of Orford, was named after her ancestress Dorothy Townshend, sister of Sir Robert Walpole, whose " sweetness and intelligence " were perpetuated in the pleasing legend that on certain nights her portrait at Rainham would " slip out of its frame bringing good luck to any one whom it might encounter on its spectral rounds." Lady Dorothy Walpole, to call her by her maiden name, was born at 11 Berkeley Square, where her kinsman Horace Walpole lived from 1779 to 1797, and spent her childhood at Wolterton, her father's house in Norfolk. Her vivacity is traced by her son to a French ancestress—the first Lord Walpole, who built Wolterton, married the daughter of a wealthy Huguenot refugee from Nimes—but in Lady Dorothy it was tempered by " a philosophic serenity." Her father and her brother, the fourth Earl, were both representatives of a class entirely uninflu- enced by public opinion, and gave free rein to their cynical and fantastic humour. Her father was a great racing man, bitterly opposed to railways, indifferent to conventions, complacently insular, and so consistently anti-German that he celebrated the death of Prince Albert by putting on the lightest check trousers in his wardrobe. His daughter, with greater acumen, attributed the growth of the German influence to Carlyle rather than to Prince Albert. His son, the fourth Earl, whose varied gifts and brilliant conversation won Lord Beaconsfield's un- stinted admiration in 1840, was even more eccentric, and made no mark in public life. Lady Dorothy seems to have had a happy youth. She was most fortunate in her governess, a sort of female Roger Ascham, learnt French, Italian, and German, enjoyed herself without games, bought peppermints in the village shop from a murderer unawares, and in a long tour on the Continent enjoyed the splendid discomfort of the English
miler " on tour. At Munich she played with the Empress Elizabeth of Austria, then a Bavarian Princess. In Italy she met Hallam and his son, Lord and Lady Holland, and began a life-long friendship with G. F. Watts. Then followed seasons in London, balls and dances to her heart's content, at which her sister Lady Rachel helped to introduce the Polka—which seems to have caused even more excitement than the Tango or the Jazz—entertainments at Vauxhall and the Coliseum, culmi- nating in her marriage in the annus mirabilis of 1848 to Mr. Reginald Nevill, twenty years her senior. Of the letters of congratulation she received none pleased her more than that from Samuel Rogers, at one of whose breakfasts she had met Count D'Orsay and heard Tom Moore sing. In 1851 she was nearly crushed to death at the Exhibition when in the company of Charles Greville.
Till 1878 her headquarters were at Dangstein, her husband's estate in Sussex, then twenty-two miles from a railway station. (According to Murray, the house was formerly called Lone Beach, but the neighbouring hamlet of Dangstone may possibly be the original form of this Teutonic title.) There she entertained with impartial hospitality, her guests including Sir William Harcourt, Bishop Wilberforce, Sir Alexander Cockburn (who, we gather, could be quite serious on occasion), John Delane, and Robert Lowe. Her horticultural experiments brought her into friendly touch with Darwin and both the Hookers. Sir Joseph Hooker speaks handsomely of her genuine interest in rare plants, silk culture, and donkey-breeding. Later on she kept an aquarium for fish-lizards, experimented with edible fungi, cultivated English truffles, and, though unmusical, started an aerial orchestra by tying whistles to her pigeons' tails, a Chinese device introduced to her by Sir Harry Parkes. She kept all manner of pets, including Siamese cats, and was one of the first to welcome the " Pelde " ; she painted on china, carved frames, was an expert at illumination and heraldic designs ; and yet, while disavowing all professional philanthropy, and holding old-fashioned views on the education of the working classes, found time to train village girls for service. The Evolu- tion controversy left her calm. She read Darwin and Tyler and Renan and continued to be a regular church-goer. As her son says in one of the best phrases of a somewhat laxly written book :
• The Life and Letters of Lady Dorothy Haat. By her Bon, Ralph Nevill. London : Methuen. [18s. net.] `She had no Sabbatarian prejudices and, like her friend Bernal Osborne, was inclined to regard the English Sunday as a day on which much indolent ineptitude is allowed to pass for religious repose." In many ways she had an eighteenth-century mind ; was devoted to the memory of Sir Robert and Horace Walpole, and admired Pope above all poets. All her life she was a great collector, and she collected friends as she collected curios. An aristocrat and a Tory, she was under no illusions as to the shortcomings of her class or party, and would frankly admit, so her son tells us, that some of the old-world aristocrats had been ab3urdly over- bearing in their easy leisured arrogance. As for the alleged deterioration of society in the " eighties," she distributed the blame impartially if ungrammatically. " It is all owing to these low-lived millionaires promenading their wealth, and we asses thinking we must copy them at all risks." She preferred the " sagacious audacity " of Palmerston and Lord Beaconsfield —her intimate friend from his early dandiacal days—to the emergency opportunism of their Liberal successors, but never allowed her political opinions to interfere with her personal friendships. She admired Cobden the man, corresponded with John Bright, greatly enjoyed the society of Mr. Lowe, and welcomed Mr. Chamberlain to her house when some of her old-fashioned friends thought him a dangerous revolutionary. On her husband's death she moved for a while to Stillyans, in East Sussex, where she found fresh scope for her energies in breeding black sheep—" I am not philanthropic," she once said in a cynical mood, " and prefer animals to my own species "—in the culture of derevisses, in keeping storks and Cornish °houghs, and conducting an anti-Mormon propaganda. From the "eighties" onward her home was in Mayfair, where her Sunday luncheons were a rendezvous for all sorts and conditions of celebrities. She mingled them discreetly, however, assigning the beaux rides to the shining lights of the Tory Party, but not neglecting literary lions, and raiding Upper Bohemia with great success. Her son ascribes her efficiency as a hostess to her ability to keep silent at the right time. But she had other gifts. She was not a Sibyl, but she combined an amused tolerance of and regard for minor lions with a capacity for eliciting the confidences of men of commanding intellect, and even genius. She talked better than she wrote. Her own letters are rather disappointing and are very badly edited.
The interest of the latter half of the book resides in the extremely outspoken utterances of a number of eminent men, the publication of some of which cannot fail to provoke surprise. Mr. Chamberlain's letters are racy and vigorous ; the late Lord Lytton's epistles are elegant to floridity; Lord Wolseley's com- ments on Mr. Gladstone's policy in the Sudan, Egypt, and Ireland leave nothing to be desired in their severity ; and Mr. Frederic Harrison appears as a Cassandra, some of whose prophecies about Germany have proved only too true. Inci- dentally we may note that the letters from King Edward prove that he did read books, at least some of the novels suggested by Lady Dorothy. Mr. Ralph Nevill has added a plentiful seasoning of anecdote, not always relevant but often entertaining, as in his long digression on Lord Clanricarde. But his political and social comments are disfigured by partisanship ; he frequently omits dates ; and is sometimes inaccurate, as when he speal,s of Mr. Moseley being a " leader "-writer under Delane. He probably means the Rev. Thomas Mozley, who once, when asked by a publisher, to whom he had submitted a MS., whether ho had ever published anything before, is reported to have replied : " Two volumes of sermons and about 7,000 leading articles in the Times."
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