Chapter V: Part XIII: NO. XIX.—MOTIVE POWER (continued) (4)

“Lady Morgan bequeathed her papers and journals to me, with a view to
their publication. The collection was large, as she had preserved
nearly every line written to her from the letters of princes and
statesmen, the compliments of poets, of exiles, and heroes, down to
the petitions of weavers, chimney-sweeps, and servant-girls—even the
invitations sent her to dinner, and the address cards left at her
door. Many of these trifles of the day have no value now; a hundred
years hence, if kept together, they may serve to illustrate with
singular brightness and detail the domestic life of a woman of society
in the reign of Victoria. My duty in the matter of their publication
was clear enough. Lady Morgan had not only proposed to write her own
memoirs, but had made a considerable progress in her task. A good part
of a volume had been prepared under her own eyes for the press. Much
of the correspondence to be used had been marked, and the copious
diaries, in which she had noted the events of her life and the course
of her thoughts, supplied nearly all the additions which could be
desired. Under these circumstances, it appeared to me that Lady Morgan
could be judiciously left to tell her own story in her own way.”

If Mr Dixon had followed any other course, he would have done great injustice both to himself and to Lady Morgan. Her ladyship’s story, as told by herself, is indeed a literary curiosity: had it been told by him, or by anybody else, we doubt whether it would have found a dozen readers. It is probable, for example, that Mr Dixon would have endeavoured to settle the dates of events as they occurred. Possibly, too, he might have narrated these events exactly as they befell: we are pretty sure that he would have done his best to draw a faithful portraiture of his heroine—coloured, perhaps, with the tints which biographers are apt to shed over the objects of their laudation, but not absolutely blazing. Lady Morgan knew a great deal better than this. She starts with the frank avowal, “that she never means to be trammelled by attending to dates.... What has a woman to do with dates?—cold, false, erroneous, chronological dates! New style, old style, procession of the equinox; ill-timed calculation of comets long since due at their stations, yet never come.” Don’t let the reader suppose that this is a mere empty flourish of trumpets. Lady Morgan was never more earnest in her life than when she wrote these sentences. It formed part of her plan to be considered as enjoying a perpetual youth, and she took the readiest, and, as she believed, the surest means of effecting that purpose. In like manner, Lady Morgan had resolved that from beginning to end, her career, as the world was to follow it, should be a romance. She throws an air of mystery, therefore, not only over the date of her birth, but over all the incidents of place and condition into which she fell; till circumstances, as wonderful as they are fortunate, combined to plant her in the foremost ranks of literature and fashion. This gives her an immense advantage over autobiographers in general. She is free to say what she pleases, and to say it as she pleases; and if the public be perverse enough to discredit her statements wholly or in part, what is that to her? The public will read her book and talk about it, and the subject of it; and her manes, if she have any manes, will for a while be gladdened.

There are two ways of telling the story of Lady Morgan’s infancy and girlhood. The first, or poetical, which is her own, describes her as descended from an old Irish family—as the daughter of a man of brilliant genius and the highest sense of honour—as coming into the world at a moment when this great and good man’s affairs happened, unfortunately, to be in confusion; and as thus forced, without any fault of his or her own, to make a too early acquaintance with poverty and its attendant evils. The other, or prosaic, which has no foundation to rest upon except vulgar fact, says that Sydney Owenson was the daughter of a strolling player, who could never clearly distinguish between _meum_ and _tuum_—who was always rollicking, light-hearted, and merry—who spent every farthing which he earned faster than it came in, was often in prison, and perpetually in debt. The poetic, or Lady Morgan’s reading, further shows that the Owensons or M‘Owens came from one of the great houses of Connaught, which at some remote period, date unknown, had lost or forfeited their enormous estates; that her grandfather, a handsome young yeoman, ran away with her grandmother, and that, though very poor, they lived, upon the whole, comfortably and respectably together. The other, or prosaic version, seems to say that it was Miss Owenson’s grandmother who ran away with her grandfather; that she fell in love with his _illigant_ Hibernian proportions on the occasion of a great curling-match, and never let him alone till he had made her his wife. It is not, however, so easy, as we advance in this interesting history, to follow the line which separates the ideal from the real; but this much at least is certain, that before the end of a year the _ci-devant_ Miss Crofton became the mother of Robert M‘Owen, and that Robert M‘Owen became in due course of time the father of Sydney Lady Morgan.

There is nothing to show very clearly under what circumstances the patronymic M‘Owen made way for the more euphonious Owenson. We are inclined to believe that the change must have occurred at the time when young M‘Owen became a dependant upon the Blakes, and hereby hangs a tale. Mrs M‘Owen, it appears, was a sweet singer, and played skilfully on the Irish harp. She possessed likewise a large share of that inventive faculty which descended to her granddaughter, for she managed to get up such a story, and to tell it so effectively, as to induce a rich neighbour to become the patron of her son. A Mr Blake, a man of enormous wealth, had purchased the property on which M‘Owen’s cabin stood. He called one day on the inmates, and was struck, of course, with the ladylike manners of one of them, who soon made him aware of the gentility of her own descent, and got up a pedigree still more startling for her husband and son. Mr Blake was assured, with great solemnity and perfect effect, that at some period indefinitely remote a Blake had diddled a M‘Owen out of his estate. The millionaire’s sympathies were awakened, either by the tale, or by the manner of telling it; and as he had previously been struck by the boy’s exquisite voice (for young M‘Owen sang like a thrush, and formed one of the choir in the morning at the chapel, and in the afternoon at the church), Mr Blake forthwith proposed to take him into his family and do for him. It was too good an offer to be refused. Young M‘Owen, henceforth to be spoken of as Owenson, left the cabin for the hall, and received just such an education as a horribly selfish bachelor with some fine tastes considered would suffice to render the boy useful to himself, and amusing to other people.

We hear nothing after this of Grandfather M‘Owen, and not much of Grandmother. They probably continued to live, the rest of their days, the cat-and-dog life which usually falls to the lot of persons circumstanced as they were; but the son goes with his patron to Dublin, where for the first time he is present at a play. By-and-by, after exchanging his frieze for broadcloth, he removes to London. There wits and beauties flock about him. He is very clever—he sings divinely. Oliver Goldsmith is his first cousin, five times removed, and Madame Weichsel takes a fancy to him. This is too much, and the lad’s head gets turned. Mr Blake has occasion to visit Ireland, or says that he has, and goes away, after charging young Owenson to keep at home and look after his property. In particular, he charges the lad not to go to the theatre in his absence, or to any other place of public amusement; but no sooner is the patron’s back turned, than the protégé hurries off to Vauxhall, and is easily persuaded to take part in the duet of ‘Fair Aurora’ with his friend Madame Weichsel, who has an engagement there. He little knows what eyes are upon him all the while. Mr Blake has not gone to Ireland; he has come to Vauxhall to be amused, and after listening to the duet, and probably applauding it, he goes straight back to his house in Russell Street. We are not prepared to say what might have happened had young Owenson returned home to sleep. But he did nothing of the sort; he was out on a spree for three days and three nights, and found, when the fun was over, that his trunk stood ready roped in the hall, and that a letter from Mr Blake, containing a bank post-bill for £300, requested him to go about his business.

On the whole, we are inclined to believe that this is a not incorrect statement of the case. Some allowances must of course be made for over-colouring. Probably Owenson was not quite the accomplished gentleman whom his daughter represents him to have been, nor Mr Blake the sybarite and the brute she describes. At all events, we think he did perfectly right in getting rid of a scapegrace whom he could not trust out of his own sight. Such, however, were not young Owenson’s views of the matter. He indignantly re-enclosed the bank-note to Mr Blake (we have some doubts about that fact), and marched off, proud and penniless, to Oliver Goldsmith. The upshot was that he took to the stage, and sang and acted with moderate success. He accepted an engagement in Shrewsbury, and there persuaded the mayor’s daughter to marry him privately. It was a decided _mésalliance_ on both sides, for the good blood of old Ireland got contaminated by intermixture with that of a provincial magnate; while the magnate took so little to the honour conferred upon him, that he refused to make any settlement on the young couple, or even to see them.

Miss Hill, now Mrs Owenson, was a follower of Lady Huntingdon, and hated the stage. She prevailed upon her husband, great as he was in such characters as Sir Lucius O’Trigger and Major O’Flaherty, to abandon it, and he confined himself to singing at oratorios. This continued for a while, very much to the singer’s discontent; but by-and-by Richard Daley, Esq. of Castle Daley (let us not withhold the title), persuaded the facile Owenson to violate his pledge, and to connect himself with the Theatre-Royal, Crow Street, Dublin, of which he of Castle Daley was the patentee. There followed upon this a removal to Drumcondra, where the deputy-manager—for such was Mr Owenson’s rank—took a “pretty villa,” and Mrs Owenson bore as she best might her banishment to the land of Papists and potatoes. And here, in passing, we would venture to point out, that when Lady Morgan speaks of “pretty villas,” “elegant cottages,” “lovely villages,” and suchlike, she does not always intend that we should believe her _au pied de la lettre_. The “pretty villa” in the “lovely village” was, we suspect, in the present instance, a tumbledown, half-ruinous house on the outskirts of a dirty lane, much frequented by long-legged swine and half-naked children. And we arrive at this conclusion from recollecting a little incident in her ladyship’s after-history, which may be worth recording. She went out of town, on one occasion, to write, as she said, “in quiet,” a book on which she was engaged. Her correspondence with her fashionable friends was not, however, intermitted; and in a letter to Lady Charleville, not given in this collection, she describes herself as “sitting beside a glass door, which opens upon a velvet lawn, and commands a lovely view over one of the fairest landscapes that ever delighted the eye of a painter.” Lady Charleville, happening not long after to be near the place of “Glorvina’s” retreat, had the curiosity to go and see the spot which had been thus delineated, and found it to be a small and rather dirty room in a cottage, with a single window looking out upon a cabbage-garden, beyond which, at about ten yards’ distance, uprose a stiff quickset hedge, impervious to the vision!

We must pass lightly over what remains to be told of the family history of the Owensons. It is rather confusedly narrated, and seems to imply that the circumstances of the household were generally straitened, and that they either shifted their habitat very frequently, or were often in two places at the same time. We have just ascertained, for example, that on the arrival of Mrs Owenson in Ireland, “my father took a pretty villa for her at Drumcondra.” Yet the authority for this fact relates: “I was born on Christmas Day, in that land where all holy days are religiously celebrated, as testimonials to faith, and are excuses for festivity in ancient ould Dublin.” And here again there is a blank, which we are left to fill up as we please. On the Christmas Day of what year might this memorable event occur? Taking collateral circumstances into account, it might not unfairly be assumed that some Christmas Day about the middle of the last century witnessed the remarkable occurrence. But the inference, we suspect, would be erroneous. Having taken a good deal of pains to settle the matter, we are glad that it is in our power to save Lady Morgan from the reproach of having lived many years beyond eighty. She was born in 1776. “Bells tolled, carols were intoned—the streets resounded with joyous sounds; an uproarious party sat about the board of as fine a type of the Irish gentleman as Ireland ever set forth, when another birth” (another than what?) “was announced by a joyous gossip to the happy father, who instantly disappeared.” We cannot too much commend the taste, not to say the piety, of this whole sentence. No wonder that the guests, waiting, “not with empty glasses,” till the happy father’s return, should have considered the event a “reason fair to fill their glass again,” or that they were with difficulty dispersed on the assurance “that they should all meet again that day month, to be present at the christening of the young heathen.”

The christening of the “young heathen” took place in due time. The ceremony is well described, and the style eminently characteristic, for it is light, airy, graceful, and considerably profane. Then comes a pause, extending, as it would appear, over some years—and after that a graphic account of the lumbering of a post-coach, “on the evening of a dreary winter’s day, up the ill-paved hill of an old street in the oldest part of Dublin, called Fish Shambles Street.” Where the coach came from we are not told, but it conveyed Mrs Owenson and her two daughters (for by this time Olivia likewise had been born, and both she and Sydney were able to take their share in conversation) to the new home which Mr Owenson had prepared for them. And here comes another mystery. The house is evidently a ruin—but why a ruin, and how, if ever, repaired, we never learn. It is enough for us to know that Mr Owenson, in breach of his engagement with Mr Daley of Castle Daley, had taken the National Theatre Music Hall, and that it was opened with the representation of three pieces,—“‘The Carmelite,’ ‘The Brave Irishman,’ and ‘The Poor Soldier.’ A medley of Irish airs made up the overture, which ended with the Volunteers’ March, and my father wrote and spoke the prologue in his own character of an Irish Volunteer.” Now, if we recollect aright, the Irish Volunteers were in their glory about 1782, and as we learn that Miss Sydney, when the “post-coach” set down its burden, had held an interesting conversation with her mother about Handel, it appears to us that on this eventful night she could not have been less than six years old at the least.

Mr Owenson’s theatrical adventure was not a fortunate one. The Government went against him, by granting to Mr Daley a patent for the exclusive performance of the regular drama; and the Dublin gentry, though they took plenty of boxes at the Music Hall, objected or forgot to pay for them. Neither was he more successful in trade. His cousins, the Ffrenches, an old family, of course, exiled on account of their religion, or for some other cause, made him their agent for the sale of wines which they grew at Bordeaux; and though he certainly managed to get rid of large quantities, he was never able to remit to them negotiable bills for the same. He went, in short, to the dogs, his course thither being a good deal accelerated by the death of his amiable but gloomy and Calvinistic wife. And now began in earnest the education of the two Misses Owenson. They were placed under a French _emigrée_, a Mme. Terson, who kept school first at Portarlington, and afterwards at Clontarf, and learned from her imperfectly a good deal, living at the same time with “many girls of rank, and some of distinguished talent.” How Mme. Terson got paid we are left to conjecture. Probably she never got paid at all; but being a benevolent person, and a sort of sister of mercy, she allowed the player’s daughters to remain with her for four years, and then handed them over to a Mrs Anderson in order to be finished. Mrs Anderson, however, was a different sort of person from Mme. Terson. Her pupils “were the daughters of wealthy mediocrities; their manners were coarse and familiar;” and Mrs Anderson herself had a vulgar desire to receive _quid pro quo_. The young ladies could not, under such circumstances, remain long with her. Yet “the school in Earl Street had its advantages too, for it brought us constantly in contact with our dear father, who walked out with us every Sunday on the Mall in Sackville Street, where the fashionables of Dublin most did congregate, who seldom passed us without the observation, ‘There goes Owenson and his two dear little girls.’”

Having thus early established for herself an interest in the esteem and admiration of “the fashionables,” it is not to be wondered at that Sydney Owenson’s after-career should have been brilliant. She went with her father to Kilkenny, where he built “a beautiful little theatre,” and mortgaged it, before it was roofed in, “to a wealthy and fashionable attorney.” The usual results followed—Mr Welch, the wealthy and fashionable attorney, “foreclosed his mortgage suddenly” (we have heard that he never could get a farthing of interest), “and bills to an enormous amount were presented.” They were accepted as a notice to quit. Mr Owenson carried his daughters back to Dublin, where he placed them in lodgings under the care of their faithful maid Molly, and then bolted. The truth seems to be, that everybody came down upon him. The players were clamorous for their salaries; the workpeople insisted upon having their accounts settled; the attorney claimed the amount of his mortgage; and the Ffrenches required that some portion at least of the value of the wine which Mr Owenson had undertaken to sell for them should be accounted for. What could the poor manager do under such circumstances? He hid himself till a commission of bankruptcy could be taken out, and then, like many a wiser if not better man, walked at large again, as if nothing particular had happened.

From this date, about 1794, Mr Owenson ceases to be the prominent figure in the family tableau. His daughter Sydney assumes her proper place. Though barely eighteen, she has already had lovers without end at her feet. The first is a poor scholar called Dermody (a thorough scamp, by the by, who abused everybody’s patience, and died at last of _delirium tremens_ in the purlieus of Westminster), to whom her father had been kind. It is by no means certain that he ever seriously proposed, but he wrote many letters full of nonsense, most of which are printed in this collection. Then came the officers of the garrison of Kilkenny, two of whom at least fairly died because beautiful Sydney was cruel.

“Captain White Benson and Captain Earl” (says Miss Jewsbury, writing
from Lady Morgan’s memoranda) “were two young officers quartered in
Kilkenny during the period when Mr Owenson had his daughters with him,
while his theatre was being built. She refers to the young men in one
of her Dublin letters to her father, telling him that they had
called....

“Molly was a very dragon of discretion, and the two girls might have
had a worse guardian. Lady Clark often told of the Kilkenny days, when
she, an unformed lump of a girl, whose greatest delight was to go
rambling about the fields, armed with a big stick and followed by a
dog, once returned from her rambles covered with mud, and her frock
torn from scrambling over hedges and ditches, her hair all blown over
her face (she had the loveliest long golden hair that ever was seen),
and found her sister Sydney and these two young officers sitting in
the parlour, talking high sentiment, and all three shedding tears.
Molly came in at the same moment to lay the cloth for dinner, and
thinking they had stayed quite long enough, said, in her most
unceremonious manner, ‘Come, be off wid yez! an’ the master will be
coming in to his dinner, and what will he say to find you here
fandangoing with Miss Sydney?’ Sydney, who the moment before had been
enjoying her sorrows, burst out laughing at this sally, and, shaking
her black curly head, danced away like a fairy.”

What an exquisite piece of word-painting! What a charming scene! Who can wonder that the results should have been so serious? Of Captain Earl, to be sure, we hear nothing more, but Captain Benson wrote two letters at least to his lady-love, both of which, dated in 1798, are given _in extenso_. Miss Jewsbury’s remarks concerning them are edifying:—

“These two letters,” she says, “are much worn and torn, as though from
frequent reading and handling. On the back of the latest of them is
written, ‘This elegant-minded and highly-gifted young man drowned
himself near York a few months after I received this letter.’”

Tender as her heart was, Miss Owenson had something else to do than to indulge its weaknesses. She determined, as soon as she became acquainted with the real state of her father’s affairs, to earn her own livelihood; and however ridiculous her vanity may be, however gross her many breaches of truth and common propriety, we are bound to acknowledge, and we do it with hearty goodwill, that she went gallantly through with that purpose. Her first impulse was to turn authoress; her next and wiser, to go out as a governess or companion, if any lady, young or old, would have her. She was now about twenty-one, but looked considerably younger. There was difficulty, therefore, in finding a place for her, though her old music-master, M. Fontaine, did his best to make her merits known, and the Countess O’Haggerty, an _emigrée_ and a distinguished harpist, took her up. Accident, however, introduced her at one of Fontaine’s parties to Mrs Lefanu, a sister of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, who behaved to her then and ever afterwards with marked kindness. The result was, that a Mrs Featherstone sought her out, and, after a little preliminary negotiation, it was settled that she should proceed on a visit to Bracklin, near Castletown, in the county of Westmeath, and, if approved and approving, that she should undertake the education of two young ladies, the daughters of her new friend. If we are to believe Lady Morgan, she seems to have won the hearts and clouded the judgments of all whom she approached.

Her account of her journey to Bracklin, and of the manner of her reception there, is of course too good to be quite true, but it is very characteristic. She was to travel by the night-mail, but, being invited to a _petit bal d’adieu_ at M. Fontaine’s, she was startled in the middle of a country-dance by hearing the guard’s horn sounding at the end of the street. “Then all that could be done was for Molly to throw a warm cloak over me, with my own bonnet, and my little bundle of things, so that I might dress when I got to Kinigad. One of the young gentlemen snatched up my portmanteau, and so we all flew along the flags, which were frosted over, and got to the mail just as the guard lost patience and was mounting. So I was poked in and the door banged to, and ‘my carriage’ drove off like lightning down College Green, along the quays, and then into some gloomy street I did not remember.”

A smart young officer is taken up at one of the barrack-gates, but being told by the guard that there was an old lady inside, he declines to enter, and jumps up beside the coachman. Imagine his chagrin on discovering, when the coach stops at Kinigad, how grossly he had been deceived. “What!” he exclaims, as Miss Owenson is about to step out; “‘let such a foot as that sink in the snow?—never!’ ... and he actually carried me in his arms into the kitchen, and placed me in an old arm-chair before a roaring turf-fire.” Of course he did, and of course he was overawed and subdued when he heard that Mr Featherstone’s carriage and horses were waiting to carry the young lady to Bracklin. But what must the astonishment of the quiet country family have been when the future governess of their children walked in, “pinched, cold, confused, and miserable, in a balldress and pink silk shoes and stockings, without an article wherewith to change, her luggage having gone forward with the mail?” All, however, comes right in the end. The old gentleman looks grave, the young ladies laugh; mamma puts the stranger in charge of her future pupils, who dress her up in suits of their own. There is a capital dinner—she sings ‘_Emunch ach Nuic_’ (‘Ned of the Hills’), and ‘Barbara Allen’ (we presume, at the dinner-table), and after tea the whole entertainment is wound up with a dance, in which Miss Owenson comes off with flying colours. Why could not the old lady stop there?

“Public for public,” she continues, in her imbecility. “It may be
worth while here to contrast my last jig in public with this my first
out of the schoolroom. During the Viceroyalty of the Duke and Duchess
of Northumberland, by whose attentions I was much distinguished, as
indeed were all my family, it happened that Lord George Hill came on a
little embassy from Her Excellency to beg that I would dance an Irish
jig with him, as she had heard of my performance with Lady Glengall in
a preceding reign. He said if I would consent I should choose either
the Castle or the Viceregal Lodge for the exhibition, and that his
brother, Lord Downshire, would write to Hillsboro’ for his own piper,
who was then reckoned the best in Ireland. As it was to be a private
and not a court exhibition, my husband permitted me to accept the
challenge from the two best jig-dancers in the country, Lord George
himself and Sir Philip Crampton. I had the triumph of flooring my two
rivals. Lord George soon gave in, and the Surgeon-General felt a
twinge of gout, he said, which obliged him to retire from the lists.”

The ball is now at Miss Owenson’s foot, and she keeps it going. Her life at Bracklin is a sort of heaven upon earth. Everybody takes to her. Mr Featherstone himself, though reserved at the outset, becomes one of her thousand lovers, and carries her with him into all the society which the county can afford. So it is when the family goes to Dublin for the season. How the education of the Misses Featherstone got on at all, we don’t pretend to understand, for the teacher seems to have plunged into the very vortex of fashionable life. Among other acquaintances which she formed were Sir John Stevenson and Tom Moore, the latter of whom she did her best to captivate, with, as it would appear, only indifferent success. But if she failed to bring the poet to her feet, she caught from him the furor of authorship. She had already completed her first novel, and needed only a publisher to bring it out. Her account of the manner in which that want was supplied is too rich not to be given in detail:—

“The Featherstone family were shortly to leave town, and I resolved on
the desperate step of publishing my novel, though I did not know the
difference between a bookseller and a publisher; and I intended to
take my chance of finding one in the streets of Dublin. I had observed
that the Domenich Street cook, a relic of the Dowager Steele regime,
was in the habit of hanging up her bonnet and cloak in the back hall.
I slipped down quietly one morning early, put on the cloak and bonnet,
and with the MS. tidily put up under my arm, passed through the open
hall-door, at which a milkman was standing, and started on my first
literary adventure. I wandered down into Britain Street, past the
noble edifices of the Lying-in Hospital and the Rotunda, quickened my
steps down the aristocratic pavement of Sackville Street, then
occupied by the principal nobility of Ireland. When I got to the
bottom, with Carlisle Bridge and the whole world of commerce ‘all
before me where to choose,’ I was puzzled; but as chance directed, I
turned to the right into Henry Street, proceeding along, frightened
and uncertain. To the left rose the Church of St. Peter, where I had
gone to be confirmed; opposite to it were Stella’s lodgings, where she
and Mrs Dingley held their _bureau d’esprit_. At the other end of the
carrefoure, and on a line with the church, and on the same side with
it, my eyes were dazzled by an inscription over a door,—‘T. Smith,
printer and bookseller.’ As I ascended the steps a dirty-faced boy was
sweeping the shop, and, either purposely or accidentally, swept all
the dust into my face. He then flung down the brush, and, springing
over the counter, leaned his elbows on the counter, and his chubby
face on his hands, and said, ‘What do you please to want, Miss?’ I was
stunned, but after a moment’s hesitation replied, the gentleman of the
house. ‘Which of them—young or ould?’ Before I could make any
selection, a glass door at the back of the shop opened, and a flashy
young yeoman in full uniform, his musket on his shoulder, and
whistling the ‘Irish Volunteers,’ marched straight up to me. The
impudent boy, winking his eye, said, ‘Here’s a young Miss wants to see
yez, Master James.’ Master James marched up to me, chucked me under
the chin, ‘and filled me from the top to the toe choke-full of direst
cruelty.’ I could have murdered them both. All that was dignified in
girlhood and authorship beat at my heart, when a voice from the
parlour behind the shop came to my rescue by exclaiming, ‘What are you
doing there, Jim—why ain’t you off, sir, for the Phœnix?—and the
lawyers’ corps marched an hour ago.’ The next moment, a good-looking,
middle-aged man, but in a great passion, with his face half shaved,
and a razor and shaving-cloth in his hand, came forth and said, ‘Off
wid ye now, sir, like a sky-rocket.’ Jim accordingly shouldered his
musket ‘like a sky-rocket,’ and Scrub, leaping over the counter,
seized his broom and began to sweep diligently to make up for lost
time. The old gentleman gave me a good-humoured glance, and saying,
‘Sit down, honey, and I’ll be with you in a jiffy,’ returned in a few
minutes with the other half of his face shaved, and, wiping his hands
with a towel, took his place behind the counter, saying, ‘Now, honey,
what can I do for you?’ This was altogether so unlike my ideas of the
Tonsons, the Dodsleys, and the great Miss Burney, that I was equally
inclined to laugh and cry; so the old gentleman repeated his question,
‘Well, what do you want, my dear?’ I hesitated, and at last said, ‘I
want to sell a book, please.’ ‘To sell a book, dear,—an ould one, for
I sell new ones myself? And what is the name of it, and what’s it
about?’ I was now occupied in taking off the rose-coloured ribbon with
which I had tied up my MS. ‘What!’ he said; ‘it is a MS., is it!’ ‘The
same, sir,’ I said: ‘St Clair.’ ‘Well, now, my dear, I’ve nothing to
do with Church books, neither sermons nor tracts, do you see. I take
it for granted it is a Papist book by the title.’ ‘No, sir, it is one
of sentiment, after the manner of Werter.’ He passed his hand over his
face, which left the humorous smile on his face unconcealed. ‘Well, my
dear, I never heard of Werter, and am not a publisher of novels at
all.’ At this announcement, hot, hurried, flurried, and mortified, I
began to tie up my MS. In spite of myself the tears came into my eyes,
and poor good-natured Mr Smith said, ‘Don’t cry, my dear; there’s
money bid for you yet. But you’re very young to turn author; and
what’s your name, dear?’ ‘Owenson, sir,’ I said. ‘Owenson!’ he
repeated; ‘are you anything to Mr Owenson of the Theatre-Royal?’ ‘Yes,
sir; I am his daughter.’ ‘His daughter—you amaze me!’”

And so on, and so on; for such, in fact, is the point up to which the whole twaddle is leading. The illustrious Owenson of the Theatre-Royal has friends and admirers everywhere. His name is a talisman which opens all doors, and softens all hearts. Mr Smith introduces Miss Owenson to Mr Brown, Mr Brown allows her to leave her MS. behind, and, without a word of agreement, spoken or written, on either side, he brings it out to his own great satisfaction. Miss Owenson thus becomes famous before she is aware of it.

Though very happy at Bracklin, Miss Owenson is not sorry to leave it. She returns to the bosom of her own family, and thus speaketh:—

“We” (that is to say, her sister Olivia and herself) “are seated at
our little work-table, beside a cheerful turf-fire and a pair of
lights. Livy is amusing herself at work, and I have been reading out a
work of Schiller’s to her; whilst Molly is washing up the tea-things
in the background, and Peter is laying the cloth for his master’s
supper. That dear master! In a few minutes we shall hear his rap at
the door, and his whistle under the window; and then we shall circle
round the fire, and chat and laugh over the circumstances of the day.
These are the scenes in which my heart expands, and which I love to
sketch on the spot. Ah! I must soon leave them.”

To be sure she must; the simple truth being this, that she quarrelled with both father and sister, and had an insuperable objection to all their domestic arrangements. “In spite of her romantic love for her father,” observes Miss Jewsbury, “and her sincere attachment to her sister, the beautiful illusion of living a domestic life with them soon wore off. Accustomed as she had been so long to the plentiful comfort and regularity of Mrs Featherstone’s well-ordered household, she felt the difference between that and the scrambling poverty and discomfort of life in an Irish lodging.” So she levanted, and is next heard of in the family of Mr and Mrs Crawford, at Fort-William, in the north of Ireland. Her letters from that place are all in the old style. One of them indeed, addressed to her sister, begins by confessing that while surrounded “by that happy circle to which her heart was accustomed to expand,” “her spirits sank beneath the least appearance of discord, and she was too conscious that she was not so fortunate as to please every member of her own dear family.” The case is quite different at Fort-William. “Here I am almost an object of idolatry among the servants, and am caressed by all ranks of people.” She not only goes wherever the family are invited, but receives separate invitations for herself. To be sure, Mrs Crawford now and then runs rusty, and the self-love of the little governess receives a wound. “We had a very pressing invitation sent us for a ball at Clough-Jordan, given by a club there. Mine was, as usual, separate, but Mrs Crawford would not go. It is the third she has refused. Is it not provoking? Be content with your situation; you are young, you are beautiful, you are admired, and foolish women do not torment you!” Provoking! it was intolerable. Happily, however, crosses of this kind were rare—at all events, we don’t find many allusions to them in Miss Owenson’s correspondence with her old friend Mrs Featherstone.

“The other day we had upwards of forty people to dinner, among others
Lord Dunally, Lord and Lady Clanbrock, Hon. Mrs Dillon, the Vaughans
of Golden Grove, &c. We sang and played a good deal, and the night
finished most pleasantly with my Irish jig, in which I put down my men
completely. This has produced an ode to a jig, which I will send, when
I can get a frank, to your papa, for I know it will please him....
Well, the other night we were at an immense row at Lady Clanbrock’s,
to whom I owe so many obligations for her marked attention to me since
my residence here, that I am at a loss how to mention them. It was
quite a musical party, and—give me joy—on the decision of Lord
Norbury, who was of the party, I bore away the palm from all their
Italian music by the old Irish airs of ‘Ned of the Hill’ and
‘Cooleen,’ to which I had adapted words, and I was interrupted three
times by plaudits in the ‘Soldier tired.’”

Having thus got into the good graces of a few lords and ladies, it is scarcely to be wondered at that Miss Owenson should become disgusted with Mrs Crawford and her pruderies. “As I found that these good people” (the Crawfords) “were determined on going for life to Castle Tumbledown” (Fort-William), “and as I never had any strong propensity for the society of crows who have established a very flourishing colony in the battlements, I gave in my resignation last week.” It was time that she should, for her mind was so completely divided between authorship and gaiety, that it could scarcely be expected to stoop to the trivialities of teaching. ‘St Clair,’ brought out, as we have stated, surreptitiously, had made some stir. Miss Jewsbury says it was translated into German; but we doubt whether it was much read at home beyond the circle of the authoress’s acquaintances. The complimentary notes which it drew from her friends, however, induced her to begin another, which was to be completed in six volumes, and to which she gave the name of the ‘Novice of St Domenich.’ Part of the ‘Novice’ she seems to have written in her father’s lodgings at Enniskillen, whither, after her breach with Mrs Crawford, she appears to have retired; part in the house of a family called Crossley, to whom she paid a visit. There were several sons in that family, one of whom, as a matter of course, fell in love with her. His letters—for he wrote many—are all carefully preserved; and on the back of the envelope in which they were wrapped up Miss Jewsbury found the following inscription:—“Francis Crossley, aged eighteen, chose to fall in love with me, Sydney Owenson, aged eighteen. He was then intended for a merchant, but the ‘Novice of St Domenich,’ which he copied out, as regularly as it was written, in six huge volumes, and its author, turned his head. He fled from his country-house, went to India, and became a great man.” With exceeding naïveté Miss Jewsbury observes on this—“Lady Morgan, when she endorsed these papers, had of course forgotten her own age. It is so sweet to be eighteen.” Forgotten her own age! We should think that she had, just as she forgot everything which did not minister to her vanity or jump with the humour of the moment. But Lady Morgan could remember as well as forget, when it suited her purpose. “Among her memoranda of 1822 and 1824,” says Miss Jewsbury, “are two or three entries on the subject of Captain Crossley, which may be given in this place:” “Francis Crossley, my fast friend of the other sex, met me at my sister’s house at dinner after an absence of eighteen years. It was a singular interview. What was most singular in it is, that he remains unchanged. He insists upon it that, _in person_, so am I.” “August 24th: Received this day a letter from Captain Crossley, acquainting me with his intention of marrying. I have written him an answer _à mourir de rire_, and so ends our romance of so many years!” “August 26th: Captain and Mrs Crossley dined this day here, and I never saw such a _triste_-looking couple. My poor Francis silent and sad.” How could he be otherwise, poor man! under the circumstances—with the new and old love both before him, and cut off, by his own rash act, from choosing between?

We take leave from this date of Miss Owenson the governess, that we may follow the fortunes of Miss Owenson the authoress. Her pen is never idle. She writes, with equal facility and speed, songs, which are set to music or arranged by her father, odes, and novels. She has learned, likewise, how to attend to her own interests in disposing of her copyrights. The Dublin publisher seems to have rendered her no account, so she opens a correspondence with Sir Richard Phillips of London. The story which she tells, and her manner of telling it, take with the bibliopole, and she packs up the ‘Novice,’ and sets off alone, personally to negotiate with him. With all her foibles (for, indeed, Lady Morgan’s worst faults scarcely deserve to be described by a harsher title), there was something about her which made friends wherever she went. Mr Quintin Dick, for example, a chance fellow-passenger in the coach from Holyhead, never lost his interest in her to the day of his death. Phillips could not resist her insinuating manners. He bought her MS. (she does not say what he gave for it); and, though married and of middle age, made love to her in his own way. Gruff, stern, old Mrs Inchbald, alone of the Londoners to whom she recommended herself, repulsed her. But the repulse made no lasting impression. She returned to Ireland gratified and hopeful, and extended day by day her reputation, and the circle, already not limited, of her correspondence and acquaintances.

Lady Morgan’s novels have long since passed into the oblivion which is their rightful portion. They are all cast in the same mould. Whether we look into ‘St Clair,’ ‘The Novice,’ ‘The Wild Irish Girl,’ ‘The O’Briens and the O’Flahartys,’ or any other of the multitudinous brood which made their appearance at intervals from 1801 to 1826, each resembles the other as closely as pea resembles pea. We have in all of them the same characters, almost the same incidents, certainly the same opinions, and the same style of conversation throughout. Miss Owenson herself is the universal heroine; Mr Owenson figures in most of them, sometimes as a prince, otherwise as a nobleman. The officers with whom she associated in Kilkenny—the friends who sheltered her in her hour of need—her lovers, real or imaginary—her lord and lady acquaintances—an interesting priest, and a griping parson,—all come upon the stage. The love-passages are warm, the learning is ludicrous; the delineation of national manners and national modes of thinking one-sided; and the style lively and incorrect, or else turgid and pompous. They attained to a degree of popularity for which it seems difficult in this age to account. The truth, however, is, that Miss Owenson caught the top of the wave. By writing up Liberalism just as it began to struggle into fashion, she became to the Whigs, as a novelist, pretty much what Moore was as a poet; and she reaped her reward. For the Tories, as is their wont, while they abused her principles, followed the lead set them by their rivals, and spoke of the authoress as a woman of genius, whom it would be generous to praise and entertaining to cultivate. Hence both parties were as ready to receive her advances as she was willing to make them. Moreover, when she attained to the height of her popularity, at the date of the publication of ‘The Wild Irish Girl,’ public taste was wretched in the extreme. The Waverley Novels had not yet begun to purify the atmosphere which the Minerva Press had long darkened, and Miss Edgeworth and Miss Austin stood wellnigh alone among lady-novelists. Now, Miss Owenson, though neither an Edgeworth nor an Austin, was far superior to your ‘Anna Marias’ and ‘Girls of the Mountain.’ She had a good deal of intuitive perception into the realities of woman’s nature, though not, perhaps, into the best parts of it; and hence, in spite of frequent outrages to good manners, and sometimes to decency, she commanded attention.

“I read ‘Ida,’” writes Lady Charleville, “before it was all issued
from the press, a volume being sent me as soon as sewed; and I read it
with the same conviction of the existence of excellent talent, great
descriptive powers; and in this work I find particular ingenuity in
the novel attempt to interest us for a woman who loved two. And for
each of the lovers the episode was happily contrived on this plan, and
executed with great taste and spirit. I could have wished the
situations had been less critical in point of delicacy, as the English
gentleman has incurred great blame on all sides for having suffered
her to escape; and the poor Turk too. The politics of Athens are
ingenious; but, alas! one poor Emmet, hanging so recently in our
streets, does not suffer us to enjoy our miseries in any fiction for
some years to come. I have not read the ‘Monthly Review,’ where it is
criticised. I choose to be pleased with what you write now, though I
do heartily reprobate your putting off the period of polishing and
purifying your language, for pique to those censors, who, after all,
may be the best of friends, if they point out a path so attainable to
fame. Assuredly, to those to whom God has given fancy, and a touch of
the ethereal spark, it is doubly a duty to write pure language, under
the penalty of else rendering the best gift of Heaven valueless. Where
little is to be done, it is inexcusable to neglect that; and assuredly
you promised me that ‘Ida’ should be more correct than your former
publications, even, as you imagined, at the expense of fancy. Now, we
found as much imagination as ever, and not more of the square and
compass than hitherto.”

If it was thus that ladies of taste and delicacy, however awkwardly they might express themselves, thought and wrote of Miss Owenson’s manner of handling the tender passion, and if ladies of taste and delicacy could dispense their criticisms with so gentle a hand, it is little to be wondered at if the mass of subscribers to circulating libraries devoured such books as ‘Ida,’ and pronounced them divine.

Miss Owenson was now the fashion, and Lord and Lady Abercorn invited her to pay them a visit at Baronscourt. They had read ‘The Novice of St Domenich’ and ‘The Wild Irish Girl,’ and, being bored with each other’s society, yet equally taking a fancy to the authoress, they urged her to come and live with them, and amuse them over their dull fireside. Miss Jewsbury, writing, we presume, from her friend’s notes, thus describes the pair:—

“He” (the Marquess) “was extremely handsome, noble, and courtly in his
manner; witty, sarcastic, a _roué_ as regarded his principles towards
women, a Tory in politics, fastidious, luxurious, refined in his
habits, fascinating in his address, _blasé_ upon pleasure and
prosperity, yet capable of being amused by wit, and interested by a
new voice and face. Altogether, he was as dangerous a man for a
brilliant young woman to be brought near, as could easily be found.
Miss Owenson had, however, the virtue for herself which she bestowed
upon her heroines. Her own sentiments and romances found their outlet
and exercise in her novels; and she had, for all practical purposes,
the strong hard common sense which called things by their right names,
and never gave bewildering epithets to matters of plain right and
wrong. She had no exaggerated generosity, nor sentiments of delicacy
about other people’s feelings. The Marchioness of Abercorn was as
genuine a fine lady as the Marquess was a fine gentleman. In after
years Lady Morgan drew her portrait in ‘O’Donnel’ as Lady Llamberis.
She was good-natured and inconsequent; she took up people warmly, and
dropped them easily; she was incapable of permanent attachment, except
to those belonging to herself.”

With this amiable couple Miss Owenson lived rather more than two years. She does not appear to have been altogether pleased with her position, and no wonder. Lady Abercorn was the Marquess’s third wife, who

“Lived with him on terms of excessive politeness, and poor Miss
Owenson was expected to bear their tempers and attentions, to sit in
the cross-fire of their humours, and to find good spirits and
sprightly conversation when they were dull. Add to this, that heavy
pressure of anxiety about family matters, which was laid upon her
before her nerves and sinews were braced to meet it, and before she
had any worldly knowledge, produced a feeling of exhaustion. In the
material prosperity of her life at Baronscourt the tension relaxed,
and the fatigue of past exertion asserted itself. Her own ambition had
never allowed her to rest—she had been wonderfully successful; but at
Baronscourt and Stanmore Priory all she had attained looked dwarfed
and small when measured by the hereditary power and consequence of the
family in which she was for the time an inmate. She did not become
discontented, but she was disenchanted for the time with all that
belonged to herself, and saw her own position on its true comparative
scale. Sydney Owenson, from earliest childhood, had depended on
herself alone for counsel and support. There is no sign that she ever
felt those moments of religious aspiration, when a human being,
sensible of its own weakness and ignorance, cries for help to Him who
made us. There are no ejaculations of prayer or of thanksgiving; she
proudly took up her own burden, and bore it as well as she could;
finding her own way, and shaping her own life, according to her own
idea of what ought to form her being’s end and aim. She was a
courageous indomitable spirit; but the constant dependence on herself,
the steady concentration of purpose with which she followed out her
own career without letting herself be turned aside, gave a hardness to
her nature, which, though it did not destroy her kindness and honesty
of heart, petrified the tender grace which makes the charm of
goodness.”

Lord and Lady Abercorn were very fond of Miss Owenson in their own way. They had formed a plan for her happiness, which, in spite of the opposition in the outset of the two parties most interested, they ultimately succeeded in carrying into effect. Lord Abercorn had for his family physician Dr Morgan, a dull, priggish, and most conceited individual, between whom and the authoress of ‘The Wild Irish Girl’ he and the Marchioness determined to make a match. How the affair went on from its dawn to its consummation; how Miss Owenson compelled the reluctant doctor to fall in love with her in spite of himself; how, frightened at the results of the frolic, she would have drawn back at last, had not the lord and lady proved too clever for her,—Lady Morgan, with her usual taste, has described in detail. All the doctor’s letters, with some of her own, are printed in this collection; the latter of which, by the by, rather contradict the text of the narrative. According to her ladyship’s version, placed on record after the event, things ran thus:—There had been a great deal of love-making on his side, with something very like it on hers; but in the end—