The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope, vol 1 | Page 5

her clever eldest
daughter Marianne, aged nineteen, and preparing for the début of her
second daughter, Anne; and thence with the dawning of that year
destined to be momentous in English history, she wrote to her son John,
his father's heir- presumptive, a youth of eighteen, who had just gone to
Christ Church:
The New Year smiles upon us, and, thank God, finds us all well, except
Henry, and he gains strength. May you see many happy ones and may
the commencing year prove as happy to you as I have every reason to
believe the last was.... You are really, my dear John, the most gallant
son I ever heard of to make such very flattering speeches.... It is vastly
gratifying to a mother to have a son desire to hear from her so
frequently, and such a request must always be attended to with
pleasure.
How assiduously the writer fulfilled her promise is testified by those
packets of letters, dim with the dust and blight of a vanished century,
but in which her reward is likewise attested. "I do not believe," she
affirms proudly, "that there is a man at either of the Universities who
writes so often to his mother as you do, and let me beg you will
continue to do so, for the hearing from you is one of the chief pleasures
of my life." Moreover, that family of eight sons and five daughters,
who, at this date, shared her attention, in their relations to each other

were singularly united. Throughout their lives, indeed, the tie of blood
remained to them of paramount importance, although, as often happens,
this fact bred in them a somewhat hypercritical view of the world
which lay without that charmed circle. Graphic and lively as it will be
seen are their writings, their wit was at times so keen-edged that it is
said to have caused considerable alarm to the dandies and belles of
their generation, who suffered from the too vivacious criticism of their
young contemporaries. This was more particularly so in the case of
Marianne, the eldest daughter, afterwards the anonymous author of the
satirical novel Almack's. Brilliant and full of humour as is her
correspondence, it shows her to have been what family tradition reports,
rich in talent and accomplishments, gifted with imagination and keenly
observant of her surroundings, but withal cynical of speech and critical
of temperament--a woman, perhaps, more to be feared than loved.
Her brother John, the recipient of most of the following letters, was, on
the contrary, a youth of exceptional amiability, and unalterably popular
with all whom he encountered. Intellectual from his earliest childhood,
in later life he was a profound classical scholar. A seven months' child,
however, the constitutional delicacy which was a constant handicap to
him throughout his existence had been further accentuated by an
unlucky accident. When at Westminster, a fall resulting from a push
given to him by Ralph Nevill, Lord Abergavenny's son, had broken his
collar-bone, and with the Spartan treatment to which children were then
subjected, this injury received no attention. But what he lacked in
physical strength was supplied by dauntless grit and mental energy, so
that, although in the future debarred by his health from taking any
active part in political life, he early attained, as we shall see, to no mean
fame as a traveller and an explorer, while he was regarded as one of the
savants of his generation.
During 1805, when he was yet a freshman at Christ Church, his
younger brothers and sisters were likewise variously employed with
their education, the boys at the celebrated schools of Sunbury and
Westminster, the girls in the seclusion of a large school-room in the
rambling house in Grosvenor Square. And that the learning for which
they all strove was of a comprehensive nature, moreover, that those of

their party who had already entered the gay world never disdained to
share such labours, is shown in a letter written many years afterwards
to John by his brother Charles, in which the writer complains
sarcastically--
You have no idea how happy, year by year, as of yore, the little ones
seem--(for they will always be called so, though now Frances is as big
as me and amazingly handsome). Yet still they have not one moment of
time to themselves. They cram and stuff with accomplishments
incessantly, and they prison me in my room & won't allow me to pry
into the haunts of the Muses. Marianne and Anne have been learning to
paint for these last two years, and make (I think) but slow progress.
Marianne never will have done (I wish I could be so industrious). She
is now beginning to learn the harp. They are both learning to sing from
some great star, which is