MARY BOYLE : HER BOOK.*
Miss MARY BOYLE'S " sobriquet," she tells us, among her young companions, was " Vanessa," and she calla her auto- biography the " Life of a Butterfly." If to rejoice in sunshine and to give pleasure to all around her is to be a butterfly assuredly she deserved the name ; but she had other claims on her friends' regard and admiration in her warm heart, staunch friendship, varied gifts, and gay unselfishness. Undoubtedly she had a " good time." She was connected with many of the most distinguished families, and Dickens said of her to Lord Carlisle, who was claiming relationship with her : " I have never yet met any one who was not her cousin." Every house was open to her, her tastes were fully gratified, and she had the valuable property of not being satiated by enjoyment ; she seems never to have hankered after, or longed for, what was not within her reach. Add to this that in early life she was never enubbed,—so many parents think it for the good of their children to make themselves disagreeable by thwarting and laughing at them, which tends, more than excessive praise, to excite susceptible vanity, shyness, and self-consciousness. She was as happy in her domestic as in her social relations. Her father, a son of Lord Cork, entered the Navy on Nelson's ship at the age of ten. In 1800 he was ship- • Mary Boyle : her Book. Edited by Sir Courtenay Boyle. London : John Murray. 110,. 6d.1
wrecked on the coast of Egypt, then in possession of the French, who, instead of helping, plundered the British sailors and threw them into prison. The bright exception to these hard- hearted functionaries was Marshal Kleber, Governor of Cairo, who showed especial favour to his prisoner ; and this excited such ill-feeling that when Kleber was assassinated Captain Boyle was accused of the deed, and condemned to death. His only comfort was his pointer Malta,' who kept him warm at night, and scared away the rats and scorpions that infested is cell. There seemed no hope ; but Admiral Sidney Smith arrived just in time to effect an exchange of prisoners, and Captain Boyle and his faithful companion returned in safety to their native land.
Mrs. Boyle was a great beauty, and the chosen friend and companion of her daughters through life. Mary was the fourth child, and the only plain one ; but she possessed
charm, a far more valuable gift than beauty. She was very fair, with light hair and eyes a //cur de tete. She was often rallied on account of her small stature, but she writes :— "It has been a cherished vanity of mine that I have very long legs in proportion ; eight heads (in drawing) was the strange description I gave of myself to a friend, whose natural rejoinder was, 'What a very remarkable animal.' One of my chief moral attributes was lightheartedness; as Autolycus says :
' A merry heart goes all the day, Your sad tires in a mile—a.'
I have wooed external brightness, which does not seem unnatural to the taste of a butterfly One day when I was between three and four my mother asked me if I should like a live doll to play with. Oh, rapture! dolls were my passion. The idea was ecstasy. How I then and there loved my live doll, my brother Cavendish, with the love of half a century, and how fondly I cling to the hope of a reunion in that region- ' Where those who left us dwell in joy sublime, And those we leave will come in God's own time.'"
Wher she was seven years old Miss Boyle's father was appointed Commissioner of the dockyard at Sheerness, a position of great dignity, and his children were treated like -Princes and Princesses. She gives a very amusing account of her childish flirtations; the last was with Admiral Sir Thomas Williams, who gave her a pigeon, and she made him a present of a cow. The pigeon was called ' Tom' and the cow • Mary,' and so ended this idyll. " I now come," she writes, " to a most important episode, my first appearance on what I call the right side of the footlights." The children wrote and acted a grand drama called The King and the Usurper. There were seven characters and only three actors. The baby of four years, Cavendish, was the King, and Caroline, who had less dramatic ambition than the others. was the Insurrection. Her part was to play on the kettle- drum. All the other characters were doubled. The success was tremendous, and Mary's real vocation was fixed in her mind from that hour. Her family would not hear of her going on the stage, so she was obliged to content herself with amateur performances. The next move of the family was to Somerset House, and there she had great opportunities for indulging her taste for the drama. Mazeppa was riding for his life at " dear Astley's," Madame Vestris, Young, Kean, the Keeleys, and many others were on their respec- tive stages, and the Boyles knew most of them. She also once saw Mrs. Garrick, who, though in extreme old age, retained traces of her remarkable beauty, and, to bring the theatre down to the present day, she made acquaintance with Sir Henry Irving, who remained her friend through life. Her favourite reading was Shakespeare. She owns to a first and last piece of posing caused by overhearing her father enlarge to a friend on her wonderful taste in literature; she would bring in her favourite volume and be found "in an attitude of deep absorption poring over its pages, and fondly hoping the company would think her very clever, for she knew her father did." She did not belong to the Court herself, but she moved in courtly circles, for her mother, father, sister, and brother were all members of Royal households. Mrs. Boyle was Bedchamber-woman to Queen Charlotte, and bad rooms in St. James's Palace and Hampton Court. Life in the latter was an education in history and art, and Mary revelled in the picture galleries, and admired above everything Raphael's cartoons. Sir Walter Scott was, next to Shakespeare, the " god of her idolatry," and she felt that life had nothing to offer when she first read of the death of Lord Evandale in Old Mortality. Her friends did not all, however, belong to the highest classes. The different officials at the Palace, the dwellers in the cottages, the family servants, were all loving to little Mary,—the old nurse with her amusing malapropisms, the consequential lady's-maid, and the staunch British butler, Henry Maxwell, are vividly sketched. Henry accompanied the family abroad, and made his way in the languages be despised. He said the Italians were foreigners, he was an Englishman. On bearing some scandalous story, " One lady," he exclaimed, " was getting as bad as another."
In 1832 Miss Carolina Boyle, Maid of Honour to Queen Adelaide, gained leave of absence from Court, and with her mother and Mary and brother Courtenay set out on a long visit to Italy. They travelled slowly in a huge family ark, vid, the Jura and Switzerland.
They found at Turin the second brother, Charles, who was attached to the Legation. From Turin they went to Genoa. There was something of the gaiety of the French ladies of the ancien regime in Mary's intense enjoyment. One night she and her mother and sister resisted the persua- sions of their menfolk to go to the Veglione Masquerade, but as soon as the brothers were well off they dressed and pre- pared to follow them. " Arrived at the theatre and joined by the cavaliers we had appointed to escort us, we mixed in the motley throng, on mischief bent. My companion, one of the leaders of society who knew everything about everybody, was of the greatest use in prompting my sallies." First she puzzled and exasperated an Italian officer by pretending to be his beloved who was taking up with a new favourite, next she baffled a Marchese of her acquaintance ; but a higher triumph was in store, for she sought out her brother, chaffed and flattered him, and finally presented him with a large bouquet of violets, which she had the delight of seeing next morning in water by his bedside, the cherished gift of the unknown. The Boyles spent most interesting winters in the Northern cities and in Rome, and enchanting summers at Lucca and Naples. They returned to England in 1836 to find the King's health failing, and their close connection with the Court was soon severed. Mrs. Boyle and her daughters settled at Millard's Hill, in Somersetshire. In 1846 they paid another delightful visit to Italy. The Hollands lent them their villa at Careggi, and they had the happiness of making acquaintance with George Frederick Watts, who became one of Mary's most valued friends. At Florence she was intimate with the Levers—introduced by one of her great favourites, G. P. R. James—with the Brownings, with Felicie de Beauveau, the friend of the Duchesse de Berri, and even became a conspirator for the first and last time by conveying a letter to the Duchess. Thence they went to Rome, and returned in 1848 to Somersetshire, where they lived very quietly ; but Mary paid frequent visits to her friends in London and elsewhere. She dwells with great pleasure on the time she spent with Mrs. Sartoris, at whose house she met all sorts of distinguished people, and had her fill of talk, music, plays, &c. Of all the friends she made, she seems to have had the greatest affection for Dickens, and she grieved for him when be died as for a near relation. It would have filled up all our space to mention the bare names of all her friends ; as she herself writes : " But this book is not intended as a catalogue." She gives interesting descrip- tions of the stately country houses which she enlivened, their owners, and the politicians she met in them. But there was plenty of riding and dancing and acting, as well as con- versation. The present writer had the pleasure of being among the audience at Bowood when she acted in the cha- rade Gulliver, and will never forget her inimitable drollery in the first syllable in which she represented the adventuress coaxing Gil Bias out of his ring. After Mrs. Boyle's death she made her brother's house her headquarters, and when she lost him she established herself in a tiny house in South Audley Street, which she called her bonbcrnniere. James Russell Lowell wrote of her in 1888 : — " No knock could surprise the modest door of her bonbonniere, for it opened, and still opens, to let in as many distinguished persons—and, what is better, as many devoted friends—as any in London.
However long she may live, hers can never be that most dismal of fates, to outlive her friends, while cheerfulness, kindliness, and all the other goodnesses have anything to do with the making of them." Every one knows Tennyson's touching lines to ber ending with-
"So close are we, dear Mary, you and I, To that dim gate." 06 *aiitiii4Ot iter, and still more Inld(ltyAmangl,lembarked to meet his Pilot face to face.
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