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

to reflect on the hero's glory—which he threw like a mantle round all her faults and frailties.

Emma Hamilton is assured of a double remembrance, not only because she was loved by Nelson, but because she was painted by Romney. Through the medium of his pictures, as of her own letters, it will be seen that her personality is one of the most vivid that ever graced the stage of fame. The lovely lines of her face and form are perpetuated on so many canvases that she still seems to be dancing and smiling and meditating through the "Attitudes" that were the delight of all who beheld them during her lifetime. It is impossible to look at her many portraits and believe her the mere " adventuress " she has been so often called. There is no hard and scheming worldliness in that face, the worst fault is that it is a little soft and sensuous; but it is also gay, tender, appealing, and always has a look of innocent radiance, a fleeting wild-wood air, a touch of the eternal child—which she never entirely outgrew, in spite of her manifold and mixed experiences.

Emma's expressive face is typical of her character. Its very mobility was the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual weakness. She had not a trace of real badness in her, only a fatal adaptability, a perfectly

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chameleon capacity for taking the colour of her surroundings. It was not design or worldly advantage that led her astray, but her impulsive heart — a heart as warm and kind as ever lived, but without any moral strength to guide and keep it in the paths of virtue.She was like a child, following a butterfly into quagmires or reaching for a water-lily on the edge of a deep pool—if she overbalanced and fell in, surely Nature, who made the butterfly and the water-lily so pretty and pleasing, was to be blamed far more than the ignorant and eager child. At any rate, Nature so made Emma that she could not resist the temptation of putting out her hand to the things that pleased her—while to an easy disposition, a really generous heart, and a considerable mental capacity, was added an enchanting beauty. This beauty, and the charm which throughout her life was quite as potent a spell, sprang from a rough and homely soil, with little to explain or forecast it.Her parents were humble peasant people, her father being a blacksmith of Nesse, in Cheshire, and both of them being unable to put anything but the illiterate "mark" to their names in the marriage register.Little is known of the father, Henry Lyon, but the mother, Mary Kidd, must have been a somewhat remarkable woman, for she accompanied her daughter all through the varied and dazzling episodes of her career; and when that daughter was the wife

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of the British Ambassador at Naples, she met royalties and great ladies, and by her sound sense and unassuming simplicity won both the respect and affection of men like Sir William Hamilton and Nelson. In the year after the Battle of the Nile, Emma Hamilton described in one of her letters the place taken by her mother—

" You can't think how she is loved and respected by all. She has adopted a mode of living that is charming. She has good apartments in our house, always lives with us, dines, etc., etc. Only when she does not like it (for example, at great dinners) she herself refuses, and has always a friend to dine with her; and the Signora Madre deir Ambasciatrice is known all over Palermo, the same as she was at Naples. The Queen [of Naples] has been very kind to her in my absence, and went to see her, and told her she ought to be proud of her glorious and energick daughter, that has done so much in these last suffering months."

But those glittering days were yet hidden in the future, and little dreamed of by Mrs. Lyon at the time of her marriage. When she signed the register she could make nothing save her " mark," as has been said ; but later she taught herself to write and read, and attained a moderate degree of education, which, in her place and circumstances, betokened a certain energy and force of character.

Her daughter, Emily Lyon, was born in 1765, on the 26th of April, and as her husband died in the year of the child's birth, Mrs. Lyon returned with her baby to her old home at Hawarden, in Flintshire. There in the thatched cottage of her grandmother, old Mrs. Kidd, the little Emily Lyon—who was later to change her name to Hart, and finally to Emma Hamilton—spent her early years. They were years of poverty and rough living, but the child had the two things essential to happiness and health: kind faces round her and the unlimited freedom of a hardy, wild little country girl. The fields were her playground, the birds and beasts her friends, the buffeting wind her wholesome nurse. These early years were the only time of her chequered life when it can be truly said of her that, in her fairness and her innocence, she embodied the Wordsworthian ideal of the child who "grew in sun and shower." But in spite of errors and grievous mistakes, so long as youth remained to her, she was—

" A dancing shape, an image gay, To haunt, to startle, and waylay."

Her actual education—apart from that she unconsciously got out-of-doors—was of the scantiest. She was untrammelled and unfettered, till, at the age of thirteen, she entered the service of a Hawarden resident. It is believed that

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her mistress