Nelson's Lady Hamilton by Meynell, Esther (cheapest way to read ebooks .txt) 📗

each other by that strongest of all ties, the bond of mutual sympathies and tastes. They liked the same things and the same people, they pursued the same aims. Pictures, coins, vases, stirred them to intense enthusiasm, and in Emma Greville felt that he had something to show his critical and widely travelled uncle, which even he had never seen surpassed. Sir William was instantly and

entirely charmed. When Greville remarked complacently that Emma was " about as perfect a thing as can be found in all Nature," his uncle capped the climax—for in those days Art was considered superior to Nature—by saying, " She is better than anything in Nature; in her particular way she is finer than anything that is to be found in antique Art ! "

So we have the somewhat extraordinary picture of the young and the middle-aged connoisseur studying Emma's charms, and exulting in her as though she was an antique cameo or an unearthed statue instead of a very human piece of flesh and blood.

But Emma did not mind. She was accustomed to pose, and she enjoyed her own beauty as much as any of them. The sensitiveness that would have shrunk from such cataloguing of her graces was always conspicuously lacking in her. She was at once too much the untutored child of Nature, and too much the victim of circumstances to have that feeling and that delicacy implanted in her easy young heart.

And both Greville and his uncle were men

refinement and breeding. There could have ien nothing in their admiration, openly ex-

issed though it was, to offend the not too susceptible Emma. Indeed, she took a great liking to Sir William Hamilton, and was soon on terms of bantering and affectionate friendship

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with him, though at first she regarded him as "old"—he was fifty-five and she herself was not yet twenty. But Sir William was young for his years, upright and handsome looking, as well as charming in his manner and attentions to " the fair tea-maker of Edgware Row" (as he called her), so that Emma's impression of his age soon wore off. He flattered the girl's dawning intellectual powers by talking to her of philosophy and history and antique art, and by telling her of all the wonders of Italy. He taught her to call him " Pliny the Elder," drawing the parallel between himself and " Pliny the Younger," as he named Greville, so that Emma adopted the name gaily and with a great sense of airing her classical knowledge.

The summer brought a break-up of all these pleasant intimacies. Sir William Hamilton and his nephew had visits to pay at great houses in Scotland and elsewhere, to which the " fair tea-maker" naturally could not expect to go. But she required a change ; sea-bathing was recommended, and more than all she longed to see again her child, the little Emma who had been born shortly before she went to live with Greville in 1782. Greville had faithfully paid for the maintenance of the child, as he had promised to do, but he did not want it in sight, and it had been cared for by old Mrs. Kidd at Hawarden.

LADY HAMILTON

(NO ARTIST'S OK ENGRAVER'S NAME GIVEN)

Emma's letters to Greville during this period of separation give a very natural and attractive picture of her doings and her thoughts while away from him. She was to go to Chester and then decide for herself what watering-place to choose. From Chester, on the I2th of June, 1784, she writes—

" MY DEAR GREVILLE, — I have had no letter from you yett, which makes me unhappy. I can't go to Abbergelly, as it is forty miles, and a very uncumfortable place, and I am now going to Parkgate, as it is the only place beside High Lake I can go to ; but I will try to go there. Pray, my dear Greville, do write directly, and lett it be left at the Post Office, Parkgate, till calld for. God bless you ! I have got my poor Emma with me and I have took leave of all my friends. I have took her from a good home, and I hope she will prove worthy of your goodness to her and her mother. I should not write now tell I got to Parkgate, only I want to hear from you. Pray write, my dear Greville, directly, and send me word how to bile that bark; for parting with you made me so unhappy, I forgot the book. I can't stop to write, for the coach is waiting. My dear Greville, don't be angry, but I gave my granmother 5 guineas; for she had laid some out on her, [the child] and I would not take her awhay shabbily. But Emma shall pay

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you.Adue my ever dear Greville, and believe yours ever truly. EMMA HART.'*

She adds in a postscript, " I will write on Monday again. My love to Sir W., and say everything that you can. I am low-spirited; so do excuse me. My dear Greville, I wish I was with you. God bless you."

Three days later she wrote again, this time from Parkgate—

" MY DEAREST GREVILLE, —You see by the date where I am gott and likely to be; and yett it is not through any neglect of seeking after other places. As to Abbergely it is 40 miles, and so dear that I could not with my mother and me and the child have been there under 2 guines and a half a week. It is grown such a fashionable place. And High Lake as 3 houses in it, and not one of them as is fit for a