BOOKS.

MRS. DELANY.*

ONE partition in a long room at the National Portrait Gallery brings together on three walls all that the Gallery can show of famous literary ladies. Most of them date from the French Revolution and onwards, but the earlier eighteenth century too is represented. Mrs. Thrale is there, peak-nosed and voluble; Hannah More, a shrewd, homely old body, bunched up in a green wrapper ; Elizabeth Carter, the translator of classics, amiable, yet a trifle pedantic in spite of the pink ribbon in her white cap. But incomparably the most attractive of all these portraits is Elizabeth Carter's friend—and the friend of a hundred other people in her long life—Mary Delany. She looks down from the wall not in the least like a woman of genius, but the very incarnation of a charming and high-bred old lady. Opie, subduing his natural coarseness, has suggested something of her delicacy and refinement—and, indeed, Opie had a good right to deal tenderly with her, for he owed to her influence much of his rapid advancement—but the reproduction in black and white prefixed to this book is in many ways preferable to his sticky paint. It is ten thousand pities that she did not sit to Gainaborough or Sir Joshua, for there is no beauty so perfectly paintable, and none more delightful on canvas, than the beauty of extreme old age. Yet even under Opie's brush the mouth's perfect shape remains, firm in its gentleness, though the teeth are evidently gone; and the lines thus deepened towards the corners of the mouth are soft as dimples. The eyes, grey passing into brown, are a little sunken, but keep a kindly and humorous light; the skin below them is a little pouched, but over it, as over all the face, Time has written in his most taking characters; the chin too keeps its outline, a little softened and rounded off; and for a crowning beauty there is the soft white hair combed back under a coif from off a beautifully modelled forehead that has the tints of old ivory. Forty years earlier a friend, in one of the word portraits which were a fashion of the age, praised " the shining delicacy of her hair "; when she was fifty-seven her husband, then turned of seventy, started at Bath a paper on the model of the Taller, and wrote for it a sketch of his wife—she forbade it to be published—as the ideal woman; and that too spoke of her hair "shining and naturally curled." "Her eyes were bright," he added ; indeed, I could never tell the colour of them, but to the best of my belief they were what Solomon calls ° Dfr•s. Deldny (Mari/ Granrelr): rt Memoir, 1700-77.53. Compiled by George Paton. With 6eveu 'Portraits lu Photogravure. Lot:doh: Grant Ail:bards.

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dove's eyes." Bat neither when Dr. Delany, the eloquent Irish divine, who had a better claim than most to call Swift his friend, wrote thus of her mature beauty, nor at seventeen, when she was married almost by force to her elderly and drunken first husband, can this lady have been more beauti• ful or more charming than when she sat to Opie in her eighty-second year.

Mary Delany had the honour to be born a Granville of Devon ; her great-grandfather was Sir Bevil, perhaps the finest figure among the Cavaliers. She was born in 1700 ; bred at Whitehall, in the house of her aunt, Lady Stanley, with the expectation of becoming Maid of Honour to Queen Anne, and she died in 1788 the neighbour and intimate friend of George III. and his kindly, homely Queen. Her family's traditional politics made the death of Queen Anne a severe blow; Colonel Granville, her father, was arrested, and the family forced to retire to Devon, a sad change to the would- be Maid of Honour, who was reduced to repeating "Mr.

Pope's verses to a young lady on her leaving town after the coronation." And, indeed, one can well believe that Mary Granville, like Zephalinda, "saw others happy, and with sighs withdrew "

" Not that their pleasures caused her discontc nt, She sighed not that they stayed, but that she went. She went to plain work, and to purling brooks, Old-fashioned halls, dull aunts, and croaking rooks. She went from opera, park, assembly, play, To morning walks and prayers three hours a day."

So much one may quote, since not many of us now could emulate the young lady by repeating the lines to Miss Blount. And the sequel came all too true—the threatened lover whom Pope forecasts :- " Who with his hound comes hollowing from the stable, Makes love with nods and knees beneath a table ; Whose laughs are hearty, though his jests are coarse, And loves you best of all things—but his horse."

Here is the description of Mary Granville's first vision of ber

first husband, as she wrote it down in a sketch of her life for her friend the Duchess of Portland. She was staying with her uncle, Lord Lansdowne, and the family were at dinner when the arrival of Mr. Pendarves was announced :-

" I expected to have seen somebody with the appearance of a gentleman when the poor old dripping, almost drowned Gromio [all the persons in the sketch have fancy names] was brought into the room, like Hob out of the well. His wig, his coat, his dirty boots, his large unwieldy person, and his crimson counten- ance were all subjects of great mirth and observation to me. I diverted myself at his expense for several days, and was well assisted by a young gentleman who hal wit and malice."

She paid dear for the diversion : Gromio, sixty, gouty, and sullen, took a fancy to pretty seventeen, promised to make a settlement, Lord Lansdowne insisted, and his support and countenance were essential to Mary Granville's family, then impoverished and disgraced. Accordingly she was offered up.

The match was a failure in every way ; Gromio proved drunken, his estate was not what he represented it to be, and when he died he left her, instead of the promised settlement, with a bare three hundred a year. In the meantime the pretty young woman, married to this unattractive old cripple, had spent a good part of her time in London among very gay society exposed to constant temptation. But from first to last her life was blameless,—whether as wife or widow. Mr.

Pendarves died in 1724, and it was twenty years before his widow married again,—not for want of eligible suitors. Once her heart was touched, but Lord Baltimore did not mean marriage, and when that fact was clearly established—in an interview that hurt her cruelly—he ceased to be even an acquaintance. " George Paston " notes with reason that subsequent references to him and to the wealthier lady whom he did ultimately marry are not without a grain of very human malice.

However, she did not wear the willow ; on the contrary, she led a happy life full of interest. John Wesley crossed her path, attracted her, and was attracted ; there was a senti- mental correspondence, and but that Mrs. Pendarves was just at that moment preparing to go to Ireland, the attraction might have ended in a notable match. In Ireland she met a man even more remarkable than Wesley, being admitted to Swift's "harem of virtuous women." Her correspondence

with him does not show her at her best ; nor him either; it was only to the friends of his prime, Arbuthnot, Pope, Prior,

and Gay, that Swift wrote in a manner entirely free from affectations. Her letters are full of the excessive homage which he exacted ; yet there is a genuine sincerity in her resentment of Orrery's mean memoir: If we were not more interested in Mrs. Delany than in her acquaintances or surroundings, it would be easy to fill a review with passages of accidental interest from the letters of this clever woman, who saw the best society both in England and Ireland during a long life and was interested in everything that she saw. Two notes on costume may be instanced. In 1776 she writes : "Nightgowns are worn without hoops." Is it reasonable to infer that once people went to bed in crinolines ? The other is the special ordinance that at the Duchess of Kingston's trial "feathers and flying lappets should be laid aside, as they would obstruct the view,"—a premonition of the matinee hat.

Her connection with Ireland ceased when Dr. Delany died in 1768 at the age of eighty-four. His wife stayed with her lifelong friend the Dowager-Duchess of Portland, while settling down into the little house in St. James's Place which was her home for the remaining twenty years of her life. But she was scarcely more at home in St. James's Place than at Bulstrode, her fricad's house near Windsor, and there she formed an intimacy with the Royal household so close that when the Duchess died the King presented Airs. Delany with a cottage at Windsor, and supervised the preparations himself. More than that, he settled on his old friend £300 a year, "which good Queen Charlotte used to bring half-yearly in a pocketbook, in order that it might not be docked by the tax-collector." That is surely one of the drollest and most human traits ever recorded of a Sovereign ; so far extends the enmity to the hostis humani generis that it affects even those for whom the tax-collector operates, and the Throne itself conspires to defraud the Income-tax. Another and still kinder trait is commemorated. When the Duchess died Mrs. Delany was at her bedside, and before she left the Duke begged her to take some remembrance of his mother. She chose a bird that the Duchess had always specially petted. The shock resulted in a short illness for the old lady, and during that illness the bird died. "The Queen had one of the same sort, which she valued extremely (a weaver bird) ; she took it with her own hands, and while Mrs. Delany slept she bad the cage brought and put her own bird into it." What a pity it is that such an admir- able couple of persons as George and his Queen were so cruelly misplaced by circumstances ; and in any Vision of Judgment we should imagine Mrs. Delany testifying to some purpose. In her portrait she wears on her breast a locket inscribed "C. R.," the Queen's gift. There only remains to be said that the first introduc- tion of the Royalties to Mrs. Delany was over a very curious piece of work, which survives as a monument of her in the British Museum. She had a considerable taste for art, and drew as easily and correctly as she made verses. But after her husband's death the employment and amusements that bad formerly occupied her clever fingers had " lost their power of pleasing," as she says in a pathetic little note, when one day she hit upon the idea of copying a flower that lay before her by cutting out-paper and pasting it together. Her friend the Duchess admired the result, and so began a regular industry of paper mosaic. Before her sight failed her in 178:2 she had (within eight years) imitated almost a thousand flowers and plants so cleverly that at a very short distance each might pass for the flower itself pressed, but with a brilliancy of colour nearer to Nature than pressed flowers can keep. It is worth while if one is in the print-room to look at this miracle of ingenuity; there is a " red-hot poker," for instance, imitated with almost incredible accuracy by innumerable tiny

scraps of paper in nicely graduated shades representing every line and tint of flower and stem ; and a toadflax whose curving stems are followed through all their intricacies by the cunning scissors. It is only a curiosity, and has no more artistic value than the moralising verses prefixed to it- " Alas, farewell, I can no more The vegetable world explore "- and so forth ; but as a memento of a lady so charming and so distinguished by grace of nature rather than of position that she can still inspire the warmest interest (and, indeed, one reviewer has fairly lost his heart to her) it is well worth preserving. The thanks of all who love the eighteenth cen- tury are due to "George Pasten " for condensing skilfully into one volume the five-guinea edition in six volumes of memoirs which was published by the late Lady Llanover in 1861.