his bluff sincerity gave them unusual value. It was at Florence that Lady Blessington made his acquaintance. He acquired at once a foremost place among her many friends. Mary Power, Countess of Blessington, was born in 1790, the daughter of an Irish squire in the county of Waterford. She had beauty, vivacity, and natural refinement; but was most unhappily married before she was fifteen to an English officer, a Captain Farmer. After his death, she married, in 1818, an Irish peer, the Earl of Blessington, with whom her life became luxurious and easy. They spent some years in Italy, which yielded to Lady Blessington matter for books. Her Conversations with Lord Byron were published in 1832. She wrote also The Idler in Italy and The Idler in France. After Lord Blessington's death, in 1826, Lady Blessington settled at Gore House, Kensington. For the remaining twenty years of her life, her house was a fashionable centre of intellectual enjoyment. There she was at home in 1837, forty-seven years old, at the beginning of the reign of Victoria. She wrote novels, she edited fashionable annuals, The Book of Beauty and The Keepsake, and she and Count D'Orsay had a pleasant welcome to her social circle for all the talents. Count Alfred D'Orsay, nine years younger than Lady Blessington, was the son of a General D'Orsay, and was in the French army till he attached himself to Lord and Lady Blessington. In 1827 he married Lord Blessington's daughter by a former marriage, but soon separated from her. In 1829 he returned with Lady Blessington to England, and was looked upon as one of the leaders of the fashionable world. Count D'Orsay had some skill in drawing and sculpture, with other artistic tastes. When Landor at Florence made the acquaintance of Lord and Lady Blessington, the count was their companion. In 1829, when Lady Blessington settled at Gore House, Landor bought, with help of money lent by a Welsh admirer, a villa at Fiesole, the Villa Gherardesca. Boccaccio's Valley of Ladies was within its grounds. There, with an occasional stormy outbreak and litigation about water-rights that would have delighted Mr. Tulliver, he was happy, and his children were his playfellows. At Fiesole he prepared a revised collection of his poems, which was published by Edward Moxon in 1831, Gebir, Count Julian, and other Poems. In 1832 Landor revisited England, but he returned next year to Fiesole. In 1834 Lady Blessington superintended for him the anonymous TO A.D. 1837] LADY BLESSINGTON. LANDOR 937 publication of his Citation and Examination of William Shakespeare. Landor joined with it a dialogue between Essex and Spenser after Spenser had been driven from Kilcolman. Another of Landor's books written at Fiesole was his Pericles and Aspasia, in two volumes of letters. The publishing of these was managed for him by his friend and sometime neighbour at Fiesole, the novelist George Payne Rainsford James, who had published his first novel, Richelieu, in 1825, when he was twenty-four years old, and when Walter Scott, by whose historical novels he was moved to imitation, was still writing. In 1835 Landor, happy in his children but not in his wife, had his home at Fiesole broken up by domestic feud. Not enduring his wife's speech to him in presence of his children, he parted from his family and, after a few months by himself at Lucca, came to England. He remained in affectionate correspondence with his children, and did not quarrel with his wife's relations. He went for a time from place to place in England before settling again, and then, at the beginning of the reign of Victoria, in October, 1837, being nearly sixty-three years old, he returned to Bath. In the same year he published his Imaginary Conversations between Petrarch and Boccaccio, supposed to have been held on five successive days, which he called The Pentameron, adding to the book five various dramatic scenes, Pentalogia. When in London, Landor was happiest as guest at Gore House, where at the crowded assemblies he came to know men of the rising generation, and where, among others, he first found his friend John Forster, afterwards his warm-hearted biographer, and Charles Dickens, who transferred one or two of his outward peculiarities to Mr. Boythorn in Bleak House. Landor died at Florence in September, 1864, at the age of eighty-nine. CHAPTER XIII. IN THE REIGN OF VICTORIA. 1. AMONG the oldest writers who lived at the beginning of the reign of Queen Victoria, and had not wholly ceased to produce, were Joanna Baillie, seventy-five years old; Robert Plumer Ward, seventy-two; and Isaac D’Israeli, seventy. Joanna Baillie had published her first Plays on the Passions in 1798. In 1809 Walter Scott had superintended the production of a play of hers at Edinburgh, and in 1836 she had published three more volumes of plays. Though her plays may be little read in future time, two or three homely ballads written by her in her earlier days, such as Woo'd and Married and a', or The Weary Pundo Tow, will live with other delicate and homely pieces which have the simple tenderness or playfulness of old ballads that were written often, there is reason to think, by cultivated women. So Lady Nairne, who died in 1845, aged seventy-nine, wrote The Laird o' Cockpen, Caller Herrin', and The Land o' the Leal. Joanna Baillie lived very quietly at Hampstead during the first fourteen years of the reign, and died at the age of eighty-nine, in 1851. Miss Edgeworth died two years earlier, and, though her active life as an author closed in 1834, she published a last novel, Orlandino, in the year before her death. 2. Robert Plumer Ward, who was seventy-two in 1837, had begun life as a barrister, and in 1805, having entered Parliament, he became Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, under Lord Mulgrave. In 1807, he was a Lord of the Admiralty, and from 1811 to 1823, when he retired from public life, he was Clerk of the Ordnance. He inserted the name Plumer between his Christian and surname to please the second of his three wives. Robert Plumer Ward made his more permanent mark as a writer with two novels, Tremaine, in 1825, and De Vere, in 1827. They painted society and political life, and in society were popular, although their tone was that of a thoughtful, cultivated man, whose speculations touched essentials, and who asked thought from his reader. Robert Plumer Ward continued to write during the earlier years of the reign of Victoria. In 1838 he published Illustrations of Human Life. He discussed, in another book, what he took to be The Real Character of the Revolution of 1688. In 1841 and 1844 he produced novels, De Clifford and Chatsworth. In 1846 he died, aged eighty-one, and in 1850 the Hon. E. Phipps published his "Memoirs and Literary Remains." The last of the septuagenarians who remained active after the accession of Victoria was Isaac D'Israeli, father of a more famous son. He was the son of a Venetian merchant settled in England, and drawn from his father's profession by a love of books. At two-and-twenty he printed A Poetical Epistle on Abuse of Satire, and in 1791, at the age of twenty-four, pub TO A.D. 1841 ] R. P. WARD. ISAAC DISRAELI 939 lished the first volume of the series by which he is best remembered, Curiosities of Literature. Two years later, a second volume followed. From 1794 to 1811 he was unsuc⚫ cessfully endeavouring to earn a place as original author, by poems, romances, and novels. In 1812 he produced another book in the style of the Curiosities of Literature, called The Calamities of Authors; in 1814 followed The Quarrels of Authors. Then, after some historical disquisition on James I., with which he began the expression of his good-will to the Stuarts, there followed in 1817 a third volume of the Curiosities of Literature. This being the work of his that succeeded, there followed, in 1823, three volumes of a second series of Curiosities of Literature; after which he produced, in 1828-31, five volumes of Commentaries on the Life and Reign of Charles the First. The last of Isaac D'Israeli's books of gatherings was published in 1841, two years after he had become blind. It was called Amenities of Literature. Nine years after the appearance of that book, he died, at the age of eighty-three. Isaac D'Israeli's Curiosities and Amenities of Literature, Calamities and Quarrels of Authors, are odds and ends of the reading of a man who looked out actively for interesting bits of life and character, and took pleasure in carrying his reading along byways of literary life. He persuaded himself, in a mild way, that he was gathering materials for a History of English Literature, and he mined diligently for hidden treasures. But his heaps are unsifted, and the higher qualities of mind were little used in bringing them together. Isaac D'Israeli had a love for books beyond that of a trifler. There is human interest in each of his scraps, and suggestiveness in his manner of grouping them. The books must always be entertaining; and they may be occasionally useful to a student who will take the trouble, by his own reading, to correct or verify, and by his own thinking to get the light required for a right seeing of any supposed fact. In Isaac D'Israeli's account of Gabriel Harvey, for example, there is not a sentence without at least one error in it, expressed or implied; yet all is honestly based on reading. The errors come of reading without balancing authorities, or testing statements by known facts, or weighing evidence in any way. The lights and shades of truth are hard to get, and when got they take sharpness of effect, or what the ignorant call clearness, from a story. Many a man may be said to take great pains to spoil his work for all readers except the thoughtful. Isaac D'Israeli's fault is really, perhaps, inseparable from the kind of book on which his credit rests, and his are by far the best books of their kind. If the strictest of English scholars were so much of a magician that he could cause, at will, what books he pleased to be forgotten, he would never deprive himself and others of these pleasant stores of literary small talk. 3. Joanna Baillie and Miss Edgeworth were the veterans of literature who represented, in 1837, the woman's part in the work of civilisation. Eldest among the younger women was Barbara Hofland, born in 1770, of like age therefore with Wordsworth. Frances Trollope was then fifty-nine; Mary Somerville, fifty-seven; Lucy Aikin, fifty-six; Lady Morgan, fifty-four; Mary Howitt, thirty-seven; Harriet Martineau and Letitia Elizabeth Landon, otherwise unlike, were alike in being thirty-five years old; Anna Maria Hall was thirty-three; Caroline Elizabeth Norton, twenty-nine; and Elizabeth Barrett, afterwards Mrs. Browning, who has earned first rank among English poetesses, was also twenty-nine. There was also Lady Charlotte Elizabeth Guest, afterwards Lady Charlotte Schreiber, who in the year 1838, at the age of about five-and-twenty, enriched English literature with a translation of old Welsh Romances from a MS. in the Library of Jesus College, Oxford -the "Llyfr Coch o Hergest," the Red Book of Hergest-as The Mabinogion, Stories for the Young; "mab" being Welsh for a child. From a tale in this collection, Geraint, the Son of Urbin, Tennyson framed his poem of " Geraint and Enid." Lady Morgan, born in 1783 as Sydney Owenson, the daughter of an Irish song-writer, acquired reputation in 1806 by her third novel, The Wild Irish Girl, and then became, as a writer of light literature, active and popular, expressing liberal opinions. In 1811 she married Sir Charles Morgan, a physician with literary tastes. In the early years of the reign of Victoria, like Lady Blessington, she folded in her drawing-room at evening a little flock of authors. She died in 1859. Her Memoirs were published after her death. Mary Somerville was the first to shake man's comfortable faith in the incapacity of women for scientific thought. She was the daughter of Vice-Admiral Fairfax, was born at Jedburgh in 1780, and was sent to a school at Musselburgh. She married in 1804 her cousin Samuel Greig, Russian Consul for Britain, who left her in 1807 a widow with two children. He had not encouraged her taste for mathematics. In 1812 she married |