From Mrs. T

"April 28, 1849.

"I was very glad to receive your affectionate note, my dearest and to know you are not offended with mine to you. I wrote to you from my heart, and one is seldom misinterpreted at those times. Whilst I live, dearest -, I shall have a heart to care for you, and feel a warm interest in your happiness; you must never let any thing create a doubt of this. Will you promise me this?

"I doubt not you will be happier in Paris. It saddens me, however, to feel that, perhaps, we shall never meet again; and I am very, very sorry not to have seen you, and bade you at least good-bye.

"I cannot say how much I have thought of you, and felt for you, dearest breaking up your old house. I know how poor dearest mamma felt it, when such was her lot; and you resemble each other in so many things. Every one says you have acted most admirably, in not any longer continuing to run the chance of not receiving your annuity duly, but selling off, so as to pay all you owe, and injure no one. I think there is some little comfort in feeling that good acts are appreciated, so I tell you this. I am half ashamed of my little paltry offer. Dearest I am so glad you were not affronted with me, for I know you would have done the same over and over again for me; but then you always confer, and never accept; and I have much to thank you. for, as well as my sisters, for you have been a most unselfish friend to each and all of us.

,

"I should so like to know what is become of poor old Comte S. I wrote to him at the beginning of the year, but have never had an answer. If you meet him, do be kind to him, poor old man, in spite of his deafness and blindness, which make him neglected by others, for he is a very old friend of ours, and I feel an interest in the poor old man, knowing so many good and kind acts of his.

Lady Blessington and the two Miss Powers left Gore House on the 14th of April, 1849, for Paris. Count D'Orsay had set out for Paris a fortnight previously.

For nineteen years Lady Blessington had maintained a position almost queenlike in the world of intellectual distinction, in fashionable literary society, reigning over the best circles of London celebrities; and reckoning among her admiring friends, and the frequenters of her salons, the most eminent men in England, in every walk of literature, art, and science, in statesmanship, in the military profession, and every learned pursuit. For nineteen years she had maintained establishments in London seldom surpassed, and still more rarely equalled, in all the appliances to a state of society, brilliant in the highest degree, but, alas! it must be acknowledged at the same time, a state of splendid misery, for a great portion of that time, to the mistress of those elegant and luxurious establishments.

And now, at the expiration of those nineteen years, we find her forced to abandon that position, to relinquish all those elegancies and luxuries by which she had been so long surrounded, to leave her magnificent abode, and all the cherished works of art and precious objects in it, to become the property of strangers, and, in fact, to make a departure from the scene of all her former triumphs, which it is in vain to deny, was a flight effected with privacy, most painful and humiliating to this poor lady to be compelled to have recourse to.

Lady Blessington began her literary career in London, in 1822, with a small work, in one vol. 8vo., entitled, "Sketches of Scenes in the Metropolis." It commences with the account of the ruin of a large establishment in one of the fashionable squares of the metropolis, and of an auction in the house of the late proprietor, a person of quality, the sale of all the magnificent furniture and effects, costly ornaments, precious objects of art, and valuable pictures.

And strange to say, as if there was in the mind of the writer a sort of prevision of events of a similar nature occurring in her own home at some future period, she informs us the name of the ruined proprietor of the elegant mansion. in the fashionable square, the effects of which were under sale, was B. The authoress says, sauntering through the gilded salons crowded with fashionables, brokers, and dealers in bijouterie, exquisites of insipid countenances and starched neckcloths, elderly ladies of sour aspects, and simpering damsels, all at intervals in the sale, occupied with comments, jocose, censorious, sagacious, or bitterly sarcastic, on the misfortunes. and extravagance of the poor B.'s; she heard on every side flippant and unfeeling observations of this kind: "Poor Mrs. B. will give no more balls;" "I always thought how it would end;" "The B.'s gave devilish good dinners though;" "Capital feeds indeed;" "You could rely on a perfect suprême de volaille" (at their table); "Where could you get such cotellettes des pigeons à la champagne ?" "Have you any idea of what has become of B.?" "In the Bench, or gone to France, but (yawning) I really forget all about it;" "I will buy his Vandyke picture;" "It is a pity that people who give such good dinners should be ruined;" "A short campaign and a brisk one for me;" "Believe me there is nothing like a fresh start and no man, at least no dinner-giving man, should last more than two seasons, unless he would change his cook every month, to prevent repetition of the same dishes, and keep a regular roaster of his invitations, with a mark to each name, to prevent people meeting twice at his house the same season." The elderly ladies were all haranguing on "The follies, errors, and extravagancies of Mrs. B." "Mr. B., though foolish and extravagant in some things, had considerable taste and judgment in some others; for instance, his books were excellent, well chosen, and well bought;" "His busts, too, are very fine;" "Give me B.'s pictures, for they

VOL. I.

P

are exquisite;" "That group, so exquisitely coloured and so true to nature, could only be produced by the inimitable pencil of a Lawrence."

And this is an auction!" says the authoress at the end of the first sketch in her first work. "A scene," she continues, "that has been so often the resort of the young, the grave, and the gay, is now one where those who have partaken of the hospitality of the once opulent owner of the mansion, now come to witness his downfall, regardless of his misfortune, or else to exult in their own contrasted prosperity."

This sketch would indeed have answered for the auction scene at Gore House in 1849, seven-and-twenty years after it had been penned by Lady Blessington.

Her Ladyship thus commenced her literary career in 1822, with a description of the ruin of an extravagant person of quality in one of our fashionable squares in London, with an account of the break-up of his establishment, and the auction of his effects; and a similar career terminates in the utter smash and the sale at Gore House in 1849. There are many stranger things 'twixt heaven and earth than are dreamt of in the philosophy of our Horatios of fashionable society.

* The "Magic Lantern," &c. pp. 1, 2, 3. London, Longman, 1822.

CHAPTER IX.

ARRIVAL OF LADY BLESSINGTON IN PARIS, THE Middle of APRIL, 1849-HER LAST ILLNESS, AND DEATH, ON THE 4TH OF JUNE FOLLOWING-NOTICE of her decease.

LADY BLESSINGTON and her nieces arrived in Paris in the middle of April, 1849. She had a suite of rooms taken for her in the Hotel de la Ville d'Eveque, and there she remained till the 3rd of June. The jointure of £2000 a-year was now the sole dependence of her Ladyship, and the small residue of the produce of the sale of her effects at Gore House, after paying the many large claims of her creditors and those of Count D'Orsay.

Soon after her arrival in Paris, she took a moderate-sized but handsome appartement in the Rue du Cirque, close to the Champs Elysées, which she commenced furnishing with much taste and elegance; her preparations were at length completed-but they were destined to be in vain. In the brief interval between her arrival in Paris and her taking possession of her new apartment on the 3rd of June, she received the visits of many of her former acquaintances, and seemed in better spirits than she had been for a long time previously to her departure from London.

The kindness she met with in some quarters, and especially at the hands of several members of the Grammont family, was at once agreeable and encouraging. But the coolness of the accueil of other persons who had been deeply in