The Press. — London, England, 1855-03-31 00:00:00

MA Mrs. Farmer at Lord Blessington's, in the country ; and, finally, the drama is wound up by the disappearance of Captain Jenkins, and the marriage of the lady. Could any revela tions of Blanchester-square, or Grosvenor street, be more explicit ? We have stated nothing that is not to be foßnd in flume volumes, built up as an elabo rate memorial of the unhappy lady who is the subject of them, tenfold more unhappy in her biographer than even in her experiences, sorrowful and deceptive as they were. Who is to blame for the disgrace henceforth in separably associated with her name ? The writer of this book, who has thus brought her up out of the grave before the tribunal of public opinion, and demanded a judment upon her life. But we must hasten to the close. Lady Blessington, transported from Man chester-square to St. James's-square, was "launched into fashionable life," and took the lead, in Mr. Madden's lan.guai s e, of all "49.spasiun " competitors in society.' Here she formed au acquaintance with a young Frenchman of " remarkable symmetry of form, and eomeli " ness of face "—Count Alfred D'Orsay. This was in 1822 ; and, immediately afterwards, accompanied by Mr. Charles Mathews, a gentleman who has since acquired celebrity in other circles, the Blessiugtons went abroad. En route they were joined by Count D'Orsay. In the following June, Lord Blessington made a codicil to his will setting forth that General D'Orsay, the father of the Count, had con sented to the union of his son with a daughter of his lordship, it being left optional to the Count to select which of his lordship's daughters he preferred. In the following August, Lord Blessington executed another will and testa ment, in which he reduced a provision he had previously made for Lady Blessington from 3,0001. to 2,0001. a year, appointed Count D'Orsa) one of his executors, and fixed the sums and estates Count D'Orsay was to receive upon his marriage with one of his lordship's daughters. This singular transaction cannot be made clear without a little explanation. The short ness of the acquaintance that existed between the parties before this bequest to Count D'Orsay of an overwhelming interest in his lord ship's property is the first element in the case that will strike the reader. The young ladies, one of whom was thus disposed of, were at this time severally eleven and twelve years old, and the intended husband had never seen either of them. Lord Blessington, to some extent, pro tected them against the immediate outrage, by stating that they should be under guardian ship till they were sixteen, at which age he considered them marriageable. This safe guard, however, was afterwards abandoned, and Count D'Orsay was married to Lady Harriet Gardiner in 1827, when that young lady was little more than fifteen years old. Lady Harriet was sent for from Italy to be married to a gentleman she had never seen — probably had never heard of before. Mr. Patmore, in his recent book upon his friends and acquaintances, says that Count D'Orsay made the " fatal mistake" of marrying one beautiful woman while he was madly in love with another, whom he could not marry ; and adds, that he separated from his wife " almost " at the church-door." Mr. Madden quotes, and adopts, this statement. The history of these revolting proceedings is completed by following the biography to its conclusion. Two years afterwards Lord Blessington dies. In the following year Lady Blessington returns to England, and takes up her residence at Seymour-place, where, in 1832, Mr. Madden tells us, the Count and Countess d'Orsay were residing with her, oblivious of the fact that in another page he endorses Mr. Patmore's statement of their separation immediately after their marriage. In 1849 Lady Blessington removed to Gore house, where Count D'Orsay, who had long before formally parted from his wife, was, as all the world knows, permanently domiciliated. Any commentary upon this affair would be a waste of space that may he more usefully devoted to other matters. It carries its own moral, as it was certainly attended by its special punishment. But the reader will be THE PRESS. curious to hear what explanation, defence, or palliation is set up by Mr. Madden : Within a period of three months from the time of the death of his only son, Lord Blessington signed a documeat purporting to be a codicil to a former will, making a dis position of his property and a disposal of the happiness of one or other of his then two living daughters, au arrange ment at once imprudent, unnatural, and wanting in all the consideration that ought to have been expected at the hand of a father for the children of a second wife. Partial in sanity might explain the anomalies that present themselves in the course taken by Lord Blessington in regard to those children ; and my firm conviction, the result of my own observation, is that at the period in question, when this will was made, Lord Blessington could not be said to be in a state of perfect sanity of mind ; but, on the contrary, was labouring under a particular kind of insanity, manifested by an infatuation and infirmity of mind in his conduct with respect to his family affairs, though quite sane on every other subject, which unfitted him to dispose of his children at that juncture, and had assumed a more decided appearance of monomania after that disposal was made. This ravelled passage is an excellent speci men of that peculiar mode of reasoning which may be said to make a question turn on its own axis, by referring the cause of an event to the event itself. The looseness of Mr. Madden's definition of insanity renders his opinion valueless ; and the convenient use made of the plea of insanity on another occa sion renders it doubly suspicious in reference to Lord Blessington. When Mrs. Farmer leaves her husband, the excuse is that her husband is insane; and when Count D'Orsay marries a child of fifteen, the explanation is found in the insanity of Lord Blessington. Yet this is the nobleman whom Mr. Landor describes, upon hearing of his death, as that " disinterested, upright, and kind-hearted " man, than whom none was ever dearer " or more delightful to his friends;" and of whose kindness and generosity to his tenantry Mr. Madden himself speaks in terms of un limited eulogy. It does not occur to Mr. Madden that there were other parties to this deplorable transac tion besides Lord Blessington. He throws the whole of the responsibility upon the father who thus, obviously acting under an influence exerted upon him from some quarter, gave away his daughter to a man she had never seen ; and he has not a word of censure for those who aided and abetted in the sacrifice of a child, and the gift of large estates to a comparative stranger. Does Mr. Madden think that General D'Orsay was wholly exempt from blame ? Does he hold that Count Alfred D'Orsay, the Cupidon dichainii of the book, was quite innocent and spotless, a victim to be pitied rather than an accomplice to be condemed? Surely, if it was proper to tell the story, and to pronounce an opinion upon it at all, there should have been a more equitable distribution of the biogra pher's horror on the occasion. If Lord Blessington was not in a proper state of mind to dispose of his daughter and his estates, what is to be said of his son-in-law, who took advantage of his insanity, who accepted a fortune which he squandered, and a wife whom he abandoned, and subsequently testified his sense of benefits received by a career from the contemplation of which all sound hearts must shrink with feelings of unspeakable aversion? Mr. Madden's efforts to raise an interest about Count D'Orsay and Lady Blessington • fail not only from the nature of the materials with which he has to deal, but from his extremely injudicious way of treating them. He betrays the secrets he desires to hide, and his indiscreet panegyrics upon his hero and heroine provoke a severity of censure which a more prudent friend would have carefully avoided. His attempts to elevate Gore-house into a sort of Hotel R,' ambouillet expose alike its owner and her guests to ridicule. Gore house had a particular character, which Mr. Madden, instead of keeping out of sight, has indelibly stamped with permanent publicity. He gives us a roll of the visitors, and shows us the amusements of the interior, from which we gather that the salons were frequented by gentlemen who were never accompanied by any of the ladies of their families, and that the jousts of the evening were sometimes marked ' by practical jokes not very creditable to the tastes or feelings of the actors in them. It is only fair, however, to bear in recollection that the lively celebrities of Gore-houso had no notion that there was a literary photographer in the room catching their gestures and jotting down their pranks, and that when Count D'Orsay was making a butt of poor old M. Julien for the entertainment of his friends, ho little suspected that he was sitting for his por trait to Mr. Madden. A hundred things that are only foolish and absurd in the freedom of an intimate circle, have a very different air when they are written out in a narrative and transferred to print. But exactly in propor tion as we are able on these grounds to ex tenuate the private folly, we bud additional reasons for condemning the act that violates in the face of the public the implied confi dence of the drawing-room. There were many persons who, upon principle, resisted the fascinations of Gore-house ; and they may now congratulate themselves upon a resolu tion which has saved them from being impaled alive in this book. English society has long since protested against the practice of making books out of the hospitalities of private houses, and the unguarded conversations of people of eminence. It shut its doors against Mr. Willis on his second visit to this country, because he published a journal of his expe riences amongst us. But how can we lay claim to any delicacy or dignity in such matters after the publication of these volumes? The Americans may triumphantly retort upon us that we have no right to blame them for printing our private correspondence and exposing our domestic habits, since we have here set them the example of doing it our selves. The correspondence published by Mr. Mad den is of prodigious extent, and has been collected from an infinite variety of sources. Most of the writers are still living. The mass of this correspondence is a heap of rubbish, so far as the public is concerned :—notes and scraps of notes, about the most trivial things ; bits of verse, bad jokes, epigrams and conun drums ; and letters, passing to and fro amongst the members of a coterie, full of the most pre posterous flattery—the whole bearing much the same relation to the wit and genius of the writers, as the glass beads and brass buttons with which the Indian decks his person bear to the fine arts. There are, of course, seine exceptions—such as the letters of Mr.llickens ; but they only serve to reflect the greater dis credit upon the rest. Intermixed with this correspondence are short memoirs by Mr. Madden, which, in their shallowness and egre gious errors of statement, closely resemble the sketches of English authors we sometimes meet with in the journals of the United States. Mr. Madden draws characters in the style of a sign-painter; and a few cuts borrowed from the Illustrated News would have made his gallery of portraits coin plete. We have hitherto seen only the fashionable and profligate aspect of this work ; but it has another, and a still more curious one. There is no subject upon which the writer manifests more anxiety than the religious condition of mind of Lady Blessington and Count D'Orsay. This might have been expected to be the very last topic likely to find a place in such a bio grahy ; but Mr. Madden is a zealous member of t he Roman Catholic Church, and considered it his duty on one occasion to remind Lady Blessington of the faith in which she was born, and to point out the necessity of recon ciling herself to its duties. How far his re monstrances had any effect may be inferred from what follows : But no serious idea of abandoning the mode of life she led had been entertained by her. Yet she had a great fear of death, and sometimes spoke of a vague determination, whenever she should be released from the chief cares of her career—the toils and anxieties of authorship, the turmoils of her life in salons and intellectual circles—thatshe would turn to religion, and make amends for her long neglect of its duties, by an old age of retirement from society, and the withdrawal of her thoughts and affections from the vanities of the world. But the proposed time never came. This, however, is not the worst part of the case. Lady Blessington, according to her biographer, believed in a religion she did not follow, and affected a religion she did not believe. This " startling avowal," as it is described, we find thus expressed in her own words : Lady Blessington said, very calmly and more deliberately than usual, " The doctrines of the Protestant Church never appeared to me better than those of the Catholic Church. I was educated in the doctrines of that Chun& When 31, 1E55.