University of Virginia Library

118. LETTER CXVIII.

Dined at Lady Blessington's, in company with several
authors, three or four noblemen, and a clever exquisite
or two. The authors were Bulwer, the novelist,
and his brother, the statist; Procter (better known
as Barry Cornwall), D'Israeli, the author of Vivian
Grey; and Fonblanc, of the Examiner. The principal
nobleman was Lord Durham, and the principal
exquisite (though the word scarce applies to the magnificent
scale on which nature has made him, and on
which he makes himself), was Count D'Orsay.
There were plates for twelve.

I had never seen Procter, and, with my passionate
love for his poetry, he was the person at table of the
most interest to me. He came late, and as twilight
was just darkening the drawing-room, I could only see
that a small man followed the announcement, with a
remarkably timid manner, and a very white forehead.

D'Israeli had arrived before me, and sat in the deep
window, looking out upon Hyde Park, with the last
rays of daylight reflected from the gorgeous gold
flowers of a splendidly embroidered waistcoat. Patent
leather pumps, a white stick, with a black cord
and tassel, and a quantity of chains about his neck
and pockets, served to make him, even in the dim
light, rather a conspicuous object.

Bulwer was very badly dressed, as usual, and wore
a flashy waistcoat of the same description as D'Israeli's.
Count D'Orsay was very splendid, but very undefinable.
He seemed showily dressed till you looked to
particulars, and then it seemed only a simple thing,
well fitted to a very magnificent person. Lord Albert
Conyngham was a dandy of common materials; and
my Lord Durham, though he looked a young man, if
he passed for a lord at all in America, would pass for
a very ill-dressed one.

For Lady Blessington, she is one of the most handsome
and quite the best-dressed woman in London;
and, without farther description, I trust the readers of
the Mirror will have little difficulty in imagining a
scene that, taking a wild American into the account,
was made up of rather various material.

The blaze of lamps on the dinner table was very favorable
to my curiosity, and as Procter and D'Israeli
sat directly opposite me, I studied their faces to advantage.
Barry Cornwall's forchead and eye are all
that would strike you in his features. His brows are
heavy; and his eye, deeply sunk, has a quick, restless
fire, that would have struck me, I think, had I not
known he was a poet. His voice has the huskiness
and elevation of a man more accustomed to think
than converse, and it was never heard except to give a
brief and very condensed opinion, or an illustration,
admirably to the point, of the subject under discussion.
He evidently felt that he was only an observer
in the party.

D'Israeli has one of the most remarkable faces I
ever saw. He is lividly pale, and but for the energy
of his action and the strength of his lungs, would
seem a victim to consumption. His eye is as black as
Erebus, and has the most mocking and lying-in-wait
sort of expression conceivable. His mouth is alive
with a kind of working and impatient nervousness,

and when he has burst forth, as he does constantly,
with a particularly successful cataract of expression,
it assumes a curl of triumphant scorn that would be
worthy of a Mephistopheles. His hair is as extraordinary
as his taste in waistcoats. A thick heavy mass
of jet black ringlets falls over his left cheek almost to
his collarless stock, while on the right temple it is
parted and put away with the smooth carefulness of a
girl's, and shines most unctiously,

The anxieties of the first course, as usual, kept
every mouth occupied for awhile, and then the dandies
led off with a discussion of Count D'Orsay's rifle
match (he is the best rifle shot in England), and various
matters as uninteresting to transatlantic readers.
The new poem, Philip Van Artevelde, came up after
awhile, and was very much over-praised (me judice).
Bulwer said, that as the author was the principal writer
for the Quarterly Review, it was a pity it was first
praised in that periodical, and praised so unqualifiedly.
Procter said nothing about it, and I respected his silence;
for, as a poet, he must have felt the poverty
of the poem, and was probably unwilling to attack a
new aspirant in his laurels.

The next book discussed was Beckford's Italy, or
rather the next author, for the writer of Vathek is
more original, and more talked of than his books, and
just now occupies much of the attention of London.
Mr. Beckford has been all his life enormously rich,
has luxuriated in every country with the fancy of a
poet, and the refined splendor of a Sybarite, was the
admiration of Lord Byron, who visited him at Cintra,
was the owner of Fonthill, and, plus fort encore, his is
one of the oldest families in England. What could
such a man attempt that would not be considered extraordinary!

D'Israeli was the only one at table who knew him,
and the style in which he gave a sketch of his habits
and manners, was worthy of himself. I might as well
attempt to gather up the foam of the sea as to convey
an idea of the extraordinary language in which he
clothed his description. There were, at least, five
words in every sentence that must have been very much
astonished at the use they were put to, and yet no others
apparently could so well have conveyed his idea.
He tallked like a race-horse approaching the winning-post,
every muscle in action, and the utmost energy
of expression flung out in every burst. It is a great
pity he is not in parliament.[30]

The particulars he gave of Beckford, though stripped
of his gorgeous digressions and parentheses, may
be interesting. He lives now at Bath, where he has
built a house on two sides of the street, connected by
a covered bridge a la Ponte de Sospiri, at Venice.
His servants live on one side, and he and his sole
companion on the other. This companion is a hideous
dwarf, who imagines himself, or is, a Spanish
duke; and Mr. Beckford for many years has supported
him in a style befitting his rank, treats him with all
the deference due to his title, and has, in general, no
other society (I should not wonder, myself, if it
turned out a woman); neither of them is often seen,
and when in London, Mr. Beckford is only to be approached
through his man of business. If you call,
he is not at home. If you would leave a card or address
him a note, his servant has strict orders not to
take in anything of the kind. At Bath he has built a
high tower, which is a great mystery to the inhabitants.
Around the interior, to the very top, it is lined with
books, approachable with a light spiral staircase; and
in the pavement below, the owner has constructed a
double crypt for his own body, and that of his dwarf
companion, intending, with a desire for human neighborhood
which has not appeared in his life, to leave
the library to the city, that all who enjoy it shall pass
over the bodies below.

Mr. Beckford thinks very highly of his own books,
and talks of his early production (Vathek) in terms of
unbounded admiration. He speaks slightingly of
Byron, and of his praise, and affects to despise utterly
the popular taste. It appeared altogether, from D'Israeli's
account, that he is a splendid egotist, determined
to free life as much as possible from its usual fetters,
and to enjoy it to the highest degree of which
his genius, backed by an immense fortune, is capable.
He is reputed, however, to be excessively liberal, and
to exercise his ingenuity to contrive secret charities in
his neighborhood.

Victor Hugo and his extraordinary novels came
next under discussion; and D'Israeli, who was fired
with his own eloquence, started off, apropos des bottes,
with a long story of an empalement he had seen in
Upper Egypt. It was as good, and perhaps as authentic,
as the description of the chow-chow-tow in Vivian
Grey. He had arrived at Cairo on the third day after
the man was transfixed by two stakes from hip to
shoulder, and he was still alive! The circumstantiality
of the account was equally horrible and amusing.
Then followed the sufferer's history, with a score of
murders and barbarities, heaped together like Martin's
Feast of Belshazzar, with a mixture of horror and
splendor that was unparalleled in my experience of
improvisation. No mystic priest of the Corybantes
could have worked himself up into a finer phrensy of
language.

Count D'Orsay kept up, through the whole of the
conversation and narration, a running fire of witty parentheses,
half French and half English; and, with
champaign in all the pauses, the hours flew on very
dashingly. Lady Blessington left us toward midnight,
and then the conversation took a rather political turn,
and something was said of O'Connell. D'Israeli's
lips were playing upon the edge of a champaign glass,
which he had just drained, and off he shot again with
a description of an interview he had had with the agitator
the day before, ending in a story of an Irish dragoon
who was killed in the peninsula. His name was
Sarsfield. His arm was shot off, and he was bleeding
to death. When told that he could not live, he called
for a large silver goblet, out of which he usually drank
his claret. He held it to the gushing artery and filled
it to the brim with blood, looked at it a moment, turned
it out slowly upon the ground, muttering to himself,
“If that had been shed for old Ireland!” and expired.
You can have no idea how thrillingly this little
story was told. Fonblanc, however, who is a cold
political satirist, could see nothing in a man's “decanting
his claret,” that was in the least sublime, and
so Vivian Grey got into a passion and for awhile was
silent.

Bulwer asked me if there was any distinguished
literary American in town. I said, Mr Slidell, one
of our best writers, was here.

“Because,” said he, “I received a week or more
ago a letter of introduction by some one from Washington
Irving. It lay on the table, when a lady came
in to call on my wife, who seized upon it as an antograph,
and immediately left town, leaving me with
neither name nor address.”

There was a general laugh and a cry of “Pelham!
Pelham!” as he finished his story. Nobody chose to
believe it.

“I think the name was Slidell,” said Bulwer.

“Slidell!” said D'Israeli, “I owe him two-pence,
by Jove!” and he went on in his dashing way to narrate
that he had sat next Mr. Slidell at a bull-fight in
Seville, that he wanted to buy a fan to keep off the

flies, and having nothing but doubloons in his pocket,
Mr. S. had lent him a small Spanish coin to that
value, which he owed him to this day.

There was another general laugh, and it was agreed
that on the whole the Americans were `done.'

Apropos to this, D'Israeli gave us a description in a
gorgeous, burlesque, galloping style, of a Spanish
bull-fight; and when we were nearly dead with laughing
at it, some one made a move, and we went up to
Lady Blessington in the drawing-room. Lord Durham
requested her ladyship to introduce him particularly
to D'Israeli (the effect of his eloquence). I sat
down in the corner with Sir Martin Shee, the president
of the Royal Academy, and had a long talk about
Allston and Harding and Cole, whose pictures he
knew; and “somewhere in the small hours,” we took
our leave, and Procter left me at my door in Cavendish
street, weary, but in a better humor with the
world than usual.