Letters from Egypt | Page 3

her as they did, unite in calling her coeur d'or? And women could say it of her, for the reasons known to women. Her intimate friendships were with women as with men. The closest friend of this most manfully-minded of women was one of her sex, little resembling her, except in downright truthfulness, lovingness, and heroic fortitude.
The hospitable house at Esher gave its welcome not merely to men and women of distinction; the humble undistinguished were made joyous guests there, whether commonplace or counting among the hopeful. Their hostess knew how to shelter the sensitively silent at table, if they were unable to take encouragement and join the flow. Their faces at least responded to her bright look on one or the other of them when something worthy of memory sparkled flying. She had the laugh that rocks the frame, but it was usually with a triumphant smile that she greeted things good to the ear; and her own manner of telling was concise, on the lines of the running subject, to carry it along, not to produce an effect--which is like the horrid gap in air after a blast of powder. Quotation came when it sprang to the lips and was native. She was shrewd and cogent, invariably calm in argument, sitting over it, not making it a duel, as the argumentative are prone to do; and a strong point scored against her received the honours due to a noble enemy. No pose as mistress of a salon shuffling the guests marked her treatment of them; she was their comrade, one of the pack. This can be the case only when a governing lady is at all points their equal, more than a player of trump cards. In England, in her day, while health was with her, there was one house where men and women conversed. When that house perforce was closed, a light had gone out in our country.
The fatal brilliancy of skin indicated the fell disease which ultimately drove her into exile, to die in exile. Lucie Duff Gordon was of the order of women of whom a man of many years may say that their like is to be met but once or twice in a lifetime.

MEMOIR
Lucie Duff Gordon, born on June 24, 1821, was the only child of John and Sarah Austin and inherited the beauty and the intellect of her parents. The wisdom, learning, and vehement eloquence of John Austin, author of the 'Province of Jurisprudence Determined,' were celebrated, and Lord Brougham used to say: 'If John Austin had had health, neither Lyndhurst nor I should have been Chancellor.' He entered the army, and was in Sicily under Lord William Bentinck; but soon quitted an uncongenial service, and was called to the Bar. In 1819 he married Sarah, the youngest daughter of John Taylor of Norwich, {1} when they took a house in Queen Square, Westminster, close to James Mill, the historian of British India, and next door to Jeremy Bentham, whose pupil Mr. Austin was. Here, it may be said, the Utilitarian philosophy of the nineteenth century was born. Jeremy Bentham's garden became the playground of the young Mills and of Lucie Austin; his coach-house was converted into a gymnasium, and his flower-beds were intersected by tapes and threads to represent the passages of a panopticon prison. The girl grew in vigour and in sense, with a strong tinge of originality and independence and an extreme love of animals. About 1826 the Austins went to Germany, Mr. Austin having been nominated Professor of Civil Law in the new London University, and wishing to study Roman Law under Niebuhr and Schlegel at Bonn. 'Our dear child,' writes Mrs. Austin to Mrs. Grote, 'is a great joy to us. She grows wonderfully, and is the happiest thing in the world. Her German is very pretty; she interprets for her father with great joy and naivete. God forbid that I should bring up a daughter here! But at her present age I am most glad to have her here, and to send her to a school where she learns--well, writing, arithmetic, geography, and, as a matter of course, German.' Lucie returned to England transformed into a little German maiden, with long braids of hair down her back, speaking German like her own language, and well grounded in Latin. Her mother, writing to Mrs. Reeve, her sister, says: 'John Mill is ever my dearest child and friend, and he really dotes on Lucie, and can do anything with her. She is too wild, undisciplined, and independent, and though she knows a great deal, it is in a strange, wild way. She reads everything, composes German verses, has imagined and put together a fairy world, dress, language, music, everything, and talks to them in the garden; but she