FOOTNOTES:[18]The late Countess Stanhope.[19]“Lord Wellesley returned from his glorious administration at a very critical period in our parliamentary history. Mr. Pitt was stricken with the malady which proved fatal—a typhus fever, caught from some accidental infection, when his system was reduced by the stomach complaints he long laboured under. He soon appointed a time when his friend might come to see him. This, their last interview, was in the villa on Putney Heath, where he died a few days after. Lord Wellesley called upon me there many years after: it was then occupied by my brother-in-law, Mr. Eden, whom I was visiting. His lordship showed me the place where those illustrious friends sat. Mr. Pitt was, he said, much emaciated and enfeebled, but retained his gaiety and his constitutionally sanguine disposition; he expressed his confident hopes of recovery. In the adjoining room he lay a corpse the ensuing week; and it is a singular and melancholy circumstance, resembling the stories told of William the Conqueror’s deserted state at his decease, that, some one in the neighbourhood having sent a message to inquire after Mr. Pitt’s state, he found the wicket open, then the door of the house, and, nobody answering the bell, he walked through the rooms till he reached the bed on which the minister’s body lay lifeless, the sole tenant of the mansion of which the doors, a few hours before, were darkened by crowds of suitors alike obsequious and importunate, the vultures whose instinct haunts the carcases only of living ministers.”—Lord Brougham’s Historical Sketches.[20]Lord Malmesbury cites Lady M.’s account of Mr. Pitt’s last words as follows:—“Lady M. who saw Sir Walter Farquhar three days after Pitt’s death, and received from him an account of his last hours, said that almost the last words he spoke intelligibly were these to himself, and more than once repeated, ‘Oh! what times! oh, my country!’”[21]Here must be some mistake in my notes; for Lady Cobham’s might have been a family picture, if the term were applied to Lord Chatham’s residence; but how could it be so, as belonging to the Wiltshire estate? However, I let it stand as it was written at the time.[22]Much has been written in prose and verse on the advantages and mischief of smoking tobacco. Tissot, among others, filled a volume to prove that half the maladies of mankind may be traced to the use of tobacco. But when some millions of people, male and female, as in Turkey, smoke from morning till night, and live, florid and robust, to a good old age, it may be questioned whether Tissot showed the same sagacity in his nosological researches on this as on other subjects. All I can say is that Lady Hester gave her sanction to the practice by the habitual use of the long oriental pipe, which use dated from the year 1817, or thereabouts.As she had now kept her bed for many weeks, we will describe her there, when, lying with her pipe in her mouth, talking on politics, philosophy, morality, religion, or on any other theme, with her accustomed eloquence, and closing her periods with a whiff that would have made the Duchess of Rutland stare with astonishment, could she have risen from her tomb to have seen her quondam friend, the brilliant ornament of a London drawing-room, clouded in fumes so that her features were sometimes invisible. Now, this altered individual had not a covering to her bed that was not burnt into twenty holes by the sparks and ashes that had fallen from her pipe; and, had not these coverings been all woollen, it is certain that, on some unlucky night, she must have been consumed, bed and all.Her bed-room, at the end of every twenty-four hours, was strewed with tobacco and ashes, to be swept away and again strewed as before; and it was always strongly impregnated with the fumes.The finest tobacco the country could produce, and the cleanest pipes (for she had a new one almost as often as a fop puts on new gloves), could hardly satisfy her fastidiousness; and I have known her footman get as many scoldings as there were days in the week on that score. From curiosity, I once counted a bundle of pipes, thrown by after a day or two’s use, any one of which would have fetched five or ten shillings in London, and there were one hundred and two. The woods she most preferred were jessamine, rose, and cork. She never smoked cherry-wood pipes, from their weight, and because she liked cheaper ones, which she could renew oftener. She never arrived at that perfectability, which is seen in many smokers, of swallowing the fumes, or of making them pass out at her nostrils. The pipe was to her what a fan was or is in a lady’s hand—a means of having something to do. She forgot it when she had a letter to write, or any serious occupation. It is not so with the studious and literary man, who fancies it helps reflection or promotes inspiration.[23]About the time of the Duke of York’s affair with Mrs. Clarke, Lady Hester went into Wales, and, in an inn at Builth, she got round her the exciseman, the apothecary, the landlord, and some of the village farmers. “Pray, Mr. Innkeeper,” she said, “how should you like a painted wife, with half-a-dozen fine gentlemen about her, shaking the hair-powder on her face? Or is it agreeable, Mr. M., to have the window opened at dinner-time, in a cold November day, to let out the smells of a parcel of dogs? I suppose, if you had an uncomfortable home, you would think yourself at liberty to take a little pleasure elsewhere.” With speeches of that sort she won them all over to the duke’s side. To hear her relate the story herself, with her mimickry of the men and the landlady, to each of whom she addressed some question, which brought the case home to their own feelings, was infinitely amusing: it was one of the best scenes I ever heard her act.
FOOTNOTES:
[18]The late Countess Stanhope.
[19]“Lord Wellesley returned from his glorious administration at a very critical period in our parliamentary history. Mr. Pitt was stricken with the malady which proved fatal—a typhus fever, caught from some accidental infection, when his system was reduced by the stomach complaints he long laboured under. He soon appointed a time when his friend might come to see him. This, their last interview, was in the villa on Putney Heath, where he died a few days after. Lord Wellesley called upon me there many years after: it was then occupied by my brother-in-law, Mr. Eden, whom I was visiting. His lordship showed me the place where those illustrious friends sat. Mr. Pitt was, he said, much emaciated and enfeebled, but retained his gaiety and his constitutionally sanguine disposition; he expressed his confident hopes of recovery. In the adjoining room he lay a corpse the ensuing week; and it is a singular and melancholy circumstance, resembling the stories told of William the Conqueror’s deserted state at his decease, that, some one in the neighbourhood having sent a message to inquire after Mr. Pitt’s state, he found the wicket open, then the door of the house, and, nobody answering the bell, he walked through the rooms till he reached the bed on which the minister’s body lay lifeless, the sole tenant of the mansion of which the doors, a few hours before, were darkened by crowds of suitors alike obsequious and importunate, the vultures whose instinct haunts the carcases only of living ministers.”—Lord Brougham’s Historical Sketches.
[20]Lord Malmesbury cites Lady M.’s account of Mr. Pitt’s last words as follows:—“Lady M. who saw Sir Walter Farquhar three days after Pitt’s death, and received from him an account of his last hours, said that almost the last words he spoke intelligibly were these to himself, and more than once repeated, ‘Oh! what times! oh, my country!’”
[21]Here must be some mistake in my notes; for Lady Cobham’s might have been a family picture, if the term were applied to Lord Chatham’s residence; but how could it be so, as belonging to the Wiltshire estate? However, I let it stand as it was written at the time.
[22]Much has been written in prose and verse on the advantages and mischief of smoking tobacco. Tissot, among others, filled a volume to prove that half the maladies of mankind may be traced to the use of tobacco. But when some millions of people, male and female, as in Turkey, smoke from morning till night, and live, florid and robust, to a good old age, it may be questioned whether Tissot showed the same sagacity in his nosological researches on this as on other subjects. All I can say is that Lady Hester gave her sanction to the practice by the habitual use of the long oriental pipe, which use dated from the year 1817, or thereabouts.
As she had now kept her bed for many weeks, we will describe her there, when, lying with her pipe in her mouth, talking on politics, philosophy, morality, religion, or on any other theme, with her accustomed eloquence, and closing her periods with a whiff that would have made the Duchess of Rutland stare with astonishment, could she have risen from her tomb to have seen her quondam friend, the brilliant ornament of a London drawing-room, clouded in fumes so that her features were sometimes invisible. Now, this altered individual had not a covering to her bed that was not burnt into twenty holes by the sparks and ashes that had fallen from her pipe; and, had not these coverings been all woollen, it is certain that, on some unlucky night, she must have been consumed, bed and all.
Her bed-room, at the end of every twenty-four hours, was strewed with tobacco and ashes, to be swept away and again strewed as before; and it was always strongly impregnated with the fumes.
The finest tobacco the country could produce, and the cleanest pipes (for she had a new one almost as often as a fop puts on new gloves), could hardly satisfy her fastidiousness; and I have known her footman get as many scoldings as there were days in the week on that score. From curiosity, I once counted a bundle of pipes, thrown by after a day or two’s use, any one of which would have fetched five or ten shillings in London, and there were one hundred and two. The woods she most preferred were jessamine, rose, and cork. She never smoked cherry-wood pipes, from their weight, and because she liked cheaper ones, which she could renew oftener. She never arrived at that perfectability, which is seen in many smokers, of swallowing the fumes, or of making them pass out at her nostrils. The pipe was to her what a fan was or is in a lady’s hand—a means of having something to do. She forgot it when she had a letter to write, or any serious occupation. It is not so with the studious and literary man, who fancies it helps reflection or promotes inspiration.
[23]About the time of the Duke of York’s affair with Mrs. Clarke, Lady Hester went into Wales, and, in an inn at Builth, she got round her the exciseman, the apothecary, the landlord, and some of the village farmers. “Pray, Mr. Innkeeper,” she said, “how should you like a painted wife, with half-a-dozen fine gentlemen about her, shaking the hair-powder on her face? Or is it agreeable, Mr. M., to have the window opened at dinner-time, in a cold November day, to let out the smells of a parcel of dogs? I suppose, if you had an uncomfortable home, you would think yourself at liberty to take a little pleasure elsewhere.” With speeches of that sort she won them all over to the duke’s side. To hear her relate the story herself, with her mimickry of the men and the landlady, to each of whom she addressed some question, which brought the case home to their own feelings, was infinitely amusing: it was one of the best scenes I ever heard her act.