Letters from Egypt | Page 9

to
Esneh, where the air is softest and I cough less; I would rather die
among my own people on the Saeed than here. Can you thank the
Prince for Omar, or shall I write? He was most pleasant and kind, and
the Princess too; she is the most perfectly simple-mannered girl I ever
saw; she does not even try to be civil like other great people, but asks
blunt questions and looks at one so heartily with her clear, honest eyes,
that she must win all hearts. They were more considerate than any
people I have seen, and the Prince, instead of being gracious, was, if I
may say so, quite respectful in manner: he is very well bred and
pleasant, and has, too, the honest eyes that make one sure he has a kind
heart. My sailors were so proud at having the honour of rowing him in
our own boat and of singing to him. I had a very good singer in the

boat."
'Long will her presence be remembered and wept for among the
half-civilized friends of her exile, the poor, the sick, the needy and the
oppressed. She makes the gentle, half-playful boast in one of her letters
from the Nile that she is "very popular," and has made many cures as a
Hakeem, or doctor, and that a Circassian had sat up with a dying
Englishman because she had nursed his wife.
'The picture of the Circassian sitting up with the dying Englishman
because an English lady had nursed his wife is infinitely touching, and
had its parallel in the speech of an old Scottish landlady known to the
writer of this notice, whose son had died in the West Indies among
strangers. "And they were so good to him," said she, "that I vowed if
ever I had a lodger sick I would do my best for that stranger in
remembrance." In remembrance! Who shall say what seeds of kindly
intercommunion that dying Englishwoman of whom and of whose
works we have been speaking may have planted in the arid Eastern soil?
Or what "bread she may have cast" on those Nile waters, "which shall
be found again after many days"? "Out of evil cometh good," and
certainly out of her sickness and suffering good came to all within her
influence.
'Lady Duff Gordon's printed works were many. She was an excellent
German scholar, and had the advantage in her translations from that
difficult language of her labours being shared by her husband. Ranke,
Niebuhr, Feuerbach, Moltke, and others, owe their introduction to our
English-reading public to the industry and talent of her pen. She was
also a classic scholar of no mean pretensions. Perhaps no woman of our
own time, except Mrs. Somerville and Mrs. Browning in their very
different styles, combined so much erudition with so much natural
ability. She was the daughter of Mr. Austin, the well-known professor
of jurisprudence, and his gifted wife, Sarah Austin, whose name is
familiar to thousands of readers, and whose social brilliancy is yet
remembered with extreme admiration and regret by the generation
immediately preceding our own.
'That Lucie, Lady Duff Gordon, inherited the best of the intellect and

qualities of both these parents will, we think, hardly be disputed, and
she had besides, of her own, a certain generosity of spirit, a widespread
sympathy for humanity in general, without narrowness or sectarianism,
which might well prove her faith modelled on the sentence which
appeals too often in vain from the last page of the printed Bible to
resenting and dissenting religionists, "Multae terricolis linguae,
coelestibus una."'
* * * * *
The last two years of my mother's life were one long struggle against
deadly disease. The last winter was cheered by the presence of my
brother, but at her express desire he came home in early summer to
continue his studies, and my father and I were going out to see her,
when the news came of her death at Cairo on July 14, 1869. Her desire
had been to be among her 'own people' at Thebes, but when she felt she
would never see Luxor again, she gave orders to be buried as quietly as
possible in the cemetery at Cairo. The memory of her talent, simplicity,
stately beauty, and extraordinary eloquence, and her almost passionate
pity for any oppressed creature, will not easily fade. She bore great pain,
and what was almost a greater trial, absence from her husband, her little
daughter Urania, and her many friends, uncomplainingly, gleaning
what consolation she could by helping her poor Arab neighbours, who
adored her, and have not, I am told, forgotten the 'Great Lady' who was
so good to them.
* * * * *
The first volume of Lady Duff Gordon's 'Letters from