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and married, about 1780, the Earl of Bessborough, by whom she had several sons and daughters. These included the fourth Earl, to whom the Greville Memoirs pay a high tribute; Frederick, a very distinguished soldier; and Caroline, who became the eccentric Lady Caroline Lamb.* Granville first met Lady Bessborough at Naples, in 1794, when she was thirty-three, and he scarcely twenty-one; and from Lady Holland's Memoirs it is evident that the youth was deeply impressed. Their correspondence began immediately afterwards, to be continued till just before her death in 1821. The first letter is lively; Granville seems to have replied by some jocular warnings against falling in love with Lord Holland, or Lord Morpeth, or himself; to which she answers that, at her age, 'le rôle de Gouvernante me sied encore assez bien, mais tout autre seroit un ridicule.' By November, when both have returned home, she promises him a lock of her hair if he can swear that he has kept his promise to abstain from play-a dangerous gift from one who still professes to be governess' and nothing else. Next April she is beginning to protest against his calling her 'very delightful,' and to beg him to address to others 'more able to return it' his 'love and attention.'

Soon afterwards she begins to quote Voltaire's verses to Madame du Châtelet, to tell him that, though he is of the age of love, she, though she weeps to confess it, is 'long past it,' and only fit for friendship. The cry is the same, only a little more emphatic, in the following October, when she begs him to regard her as a sister'you cannot think what a good Sister I make... though to be sure the character of Mother would suit me better towards you.' As we have lost Lord Granville's replies, we can only guess at what they contained; but it is pretty evident that by the summer of 1796 some people at least must have been aware that it was beginning to be a question of something more than friendship. About that time Lady Webster left her husband for Lord Holland, who married her next year; and Lady Stafford seizes the opportunity to give, in her own name and his

* It may be mentioned that the letter of Aug. 12, 1812, gives the fullest existing account of Lady Caroline's running away, when Byron pursued her and brought her back in a hackney coach to her mother's house.

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father's, a solemn warning to Granville. 'My Lord,' she writes, my Lord heard this story of Lord Holland with much Concern; it brought one he most dearly loves into his Mind. He desired me to observe to you the Misery, Disgrace, and Ruin that follow such Connections.' And so on as to the 'worldly Mischiefs' that follow; the dear, devout mother then passing on to higher ground, and 'praying the Almighty to give you Grace to withstand Temptation.'

What followed must be a matter of inference, but the lady's letters soon begin to sound a note which is scarcely that of friendship. When he goes to Paris with Lord Malmesbury, he declares that 'regrets at being absent from one whose society is most dear to me very frequently intrude'; and-to put the matter shortly— during all his absences for the next three or four years, she keeps expressing a passionate eagerness for his letters, and reproaches her dearest Granville' almost angrily if he does not write every day. As for the feeling on Granville's side, there is no reason to doubt the truth of what he wrote to Lady Bessborough from St Petersburg, in April 1805, nearly nine years from the time of which we have been speaking. He had long been urged to marry; he had made some kind of 'advances' to Lady Sarah Fane (afterwards Lady Jersey), and some to Lady Hester Stanhope; and at St Petersburg he was certainly under the charm of the 'little Barbarian,' as he and his friends called her, the Princess Galitzin. Yet here is what he wrote, not to her, but to the constant though, alas! married friend at home:

'I know not whether I have repeated to you before that to you I owe the happiest Moments of my life, but a truer opinion was never uttered or written by me; and I am persuaded that if it had been my Lot to have been married to you, I should have passed a life of happiness such as is enjoyed by few people. When I used to praise you, I remember you told me always that I viewed you under a temporary delusion. Whether that were so or not, I will not pretend to say, but I can with sincerity affirm that to this moment I look upon you as far, far superior to any other human being I have ever met with; and I look forward to the Time of our meeting with feelings of impatience such as I cannot describe.' (Vol. II, 72.)

The odd thing is that all through the period when the mutual affection was at its warmest-apparently three or four years-Lady Bessborough seems to have remained on excellent terms with her husband, to have taken every care of her children, and to have found no social difficulties either with the Court or the great houses. And, when both she and Granville had made up their minds that they must be friends, and only friends, she carried out the programme to perfection. Whether he was in the country in England, or fulfilling one of his engagements abroad, she wrote to him steadily, excellent letters, solid in matter and bright in style; letters full of personal and political news, in which talks with Canning, with Sheridan, or with the Prince of Wales take their place beside gossip on playhouse and opera, or lively little comments on books.

Moreover, as time went on, she really did wish him to marry, and was honestly pleased when, in 1809, when he was nearing thirty-five, he became engaged to her niece, Lady Harriet Cavendish. Now Lady Harriet, as we know from her admirably bright and witty letters, published some twenty-two years ago by her second son, was a clever, observant woman, as well as honest and warm-hearted; and if, either then or later, there had been anything abnormal, or even uncomfortable, in the relations between her husband and her aunt, she would have marked it. She did not, and Lady Bessborough's letters give us the reason. They are kindly, friendly, and perfectly regular. It puts the keystone on Lady Bessborough's character that she should thus have allowed reason to win the day, and that, whatever passion may have had to say in earlier years, she did not in the end allow it to spoil her friend's life, or her own.

It is not easy within the space of half a dozen pages even to sample letters which cover more than twenty years and fill quite five or six hundred pages of the book. At best we can only give some slight idea of the places Lady Bessborough visited, of her views on the curiously shifting condition of public affairs, of the statesmen she heard and talked with, and of the gossip in which she indulged when in a lighter vein. She generally writes from Cavendish Square or from her house at Roehampton-near which, by the way,

with ideas of social amelioration well ahead of her time, she had a school for beggar-girls, which was to train them as cooks and housemaids and so keep them off the streets. But often she writes from Trentham, then in its glory, or from Chatsworth, or from ‘magnificent' Wentworth, or from Hardwick, gloomy but beautiful, or from Woburn, where she loved that delightful room,' the Library, wherein were 'the finest editions of books, magnificently bound, and over the book-cases some very fine pictures (portraits most of them, Titians, Rembrandts, etc.).' In a letter written in 1797 she quotes an appreciation of Pitt by the Duke of Bedford which is worth giving in extenso :

'I wish you could have heard the D. of Bedford talk of Mr Pitt to-night. I assure you your praises of his Eloquenceare cold in comparison. He told me if I could imagine the purest, most correct, forcible, and eloquent language spoke in the most harmonious voice and animated manner, seizing with incredible quickness and ingenuity all the weak parts of the opposing arguments, and putting the strongest ones of his own in the most favourable point of view, that I should then have some Idea of what Mr P.'s speaking was. He said it was the most fascinating thing he ever heard. That in general he thought Mr Pitt plain in his person, but towards the close of an interesting speech that he look'd beautiful; and that he had so little Idea of the possibility of any woman hearing or seeing him at such a time without being in love with him, that if women were admitted to the H. of Commons, and the D. of Bedford was very much in love with any one, he would make it an absolute point with her always to go out whenever Mr Pitt got up to speak. There's for you. When did you ever say half as much yourself for your friend? It has made me die to hear him. . . .' (Vol. II, 177–8.)

The reader will note that she calls Pitt Granville's 'friend'; it must be explained that Granville and Lady Bessborough belonged to different schools in politics, and that she was proud to call herself a Foxite, while he, like his father and his whole family, was a keen supporter of Pitt. It is true that in later life, that is to say about the time of the Reform Bill of 1832, he went over to what his father would have called the enemy; but in point of fact his political evolution did not greatly differ from that of his friend and leader Canning, and long before that date

he had confessed to being no thorough-going aristocrat and to perceiving some merits in democracy. As to Lady Bessborough's politics, she is amusingly careful to disclaim having any at all on her own account. 'I have lived among politicians all my life,' she says in one place, but in 1798, when Granville proposes to bring Canning to have a talk with her, she protests against being present at a conversation where the business in hand was serious:

'for notwithstanding all my violence in politicks and talking so much on that subject, I perfectly agree with you that no woman has any business to meddle with that or any other serious business, farther than giving her opinion if she is ask'd.' (1, 218.)

A protestation of this kind may now and then have been necessary in those days, if a woman was to keep on good terms with her statesmen friends, but it must be admitted that in Lady Bessborough's case it hardly corresponded with the facts. Outside her personal relations with Granville and some others, her main interests were certainly political, if we take the word in its largest sense and include in it not party questions only, but the international questions which then as now were tearing the world asunder. When Granville was in Russia in 1805, her best and fullest letters to him deal at length with the Government's difficulties; one, four pages long, recounts a talk with 'The Pope'-their nickname for Canning-about a quarrel with Lord Hawkesbury (the future Lord Liverpool) and Pitt's attitude with regard to it; and she tells how pleased Canning was that 'a Foxite should try to make up differences.' By that time she had got over her original fear of Canning, of whom, seven years earlier, she had asked what possible chance have I of escaping under the eye of a person who judges every one with severity, women particularly, and me perhaps more than any other woman?' But this severity stood in the way of any really cordial intercourse. She admired Canning; above all, she regarded him as Granville's best and most powerful friend; but she seems to have wished for no more than to keep on good terms with him. He was never one of her intimate circle.

On the other hand, she intensely disliked Addington, for whom Granville also never had a good word; and

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