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biographer gives a fanciful account of D'Orsay's presentation to Lady Blessington. He stood before her " dazzling personality in a crowd where all were brilliant. For a moment, as it were, the circle of their lives touched, to part for the present.'

For

Coutades makes the absurd statement that during this brief visit to England D'Orsay decided to exploit the Blessingtons, that his long wanderings with them were then and there arranged, and that, in fact, while only on the threshold of manhood he showed a cunning and foresight impossible to his age and prospects. D'Orsay at that time had the whole world before him, every path to honour was open: he had already proved his talent as an artist and a sculptor, he was almost of the highest rank, he possessed an astonishing beauty and physical strength, and had already made himself popular in two countries. He was neither lazy nor cowardly, and could not have sought at that age for a dishonourable protection.

Having amused himself in England for a few months, he returned to his own country and continued his duties in the army, but there is nothing to show that he kept up any correspondence with Lord or Lady Blessington. As these three people were later intimately connected it may be as well to describe his lordship and his wife.

When Viscount Mountjoy was seventeen his father, the Earl of Blessington, died, and he became the possessor of a large fortune, which brought him in over £30,000 a year. He was handsome, clever, and vivacious, fond of acting, a "good fellow" all round, and very popular. At twenty-seven he fell in love with a Mrs. Brown, and took a residence for her in Worthing, where she bore him two children. Her husband, Major

Brown, dying in 1812, the lovers married, and two more children were born. Then Lady Mountjoy (for Mountjoy was not advanced to the earldom until 1816) died in 1814, and the widower, believing himself to be heart-broken, spent £3,000 or £4,000 in taking her body from St. Germains to Dublin, and interring it with extraordinary pomp.

Margaret Power, his second wife, was an Irish girl, considered to be of no great beauty, and at the age of fifteen forced into a marriage with a Captain Farmer, who had already shown proofs of insanity. It was not possible that such a marriage could be happy. Farmer was a brute who frequently used violence to his girlwife, striking her in the face, pinching her arms black and blue, locking her up if he went out, and sometimes leaving her so long without food that she was nearly famished.

Margaret endured all the horrors of an insane and unprovoked jealousy for three months, and then refused to go with her husband when his regiment was ordered to Kildare. A few days later Farmer, in a burst of temper, drew his sword on his colonel, was allowed to sell his commission, and by the interest of his relatives obtained an appointment in the East India Company. The young wife went back to her father's house, where for three years she lived in disgrace with her parents; then the news that Farmer was coming back terrified her into accepting the home which a Captain Jenkins had long hoped she would take. Six years later Lord Mountjoy, whom she had first seen soon after her marriage, met her again, and offered to give her his name if she would first obtain a divorce.

A house was taken in Manchester Square, where Margaret lived with her brother Robert, who had been made agent of the Blessington estates; and Captain

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Jenkins was appeased by a cheque for £10,000, being presumably the value of the jewels, etc., bestowed upon Margaret. Farmer was kind enough to fall out of a window in a drunken frolic in 1817, and so in February 1818 Lord Blessington married the fair widow who had by then become softly beautiful, with a sweetness of smile and grace of movement which set her apart from other women. She was not yet thirty, and her husband was but seven years older than herself, so that many years of happiness together seemed assured. After a visit to the Mountjoy estates they settled down in St. James's Square, but Lady Blessington probably found London life somewhat trying. I might give a long list of gallant and well-known men who crowded her drawing-room, but it would be difficult to name any lady who visited there. In spite of all the eulogies bestowed upon her by writers, artists, and statesmen, their wives would not be persuaded into making her their friend, probably because her recent connection with Captain Jenkins was too well known. This may have had something to do with the determination of the pair to go. abroad for a long time, and at the end of August 1822, the Earl and Countess left London for Paris.

Here they only stayed ten or twelve days, making great sensation, not so much by their importance as by the quantity of luggage that they carried with them. On the morning of their departure the courtyard of the hotel was full of their carriages; a crowd of valets and footmen. were busy hoisting trunks into their places; maids with books and wraps were seeing to the wants of the ladies, for Mary Ann Power, the Countess's youngest sister, was a member of the party. A patent brass bed, folding easychairs and sofas, and a batterie de cuisine all had to be packed. The whole affair assumed the appearance of a caravan intended to cross, not the desert, but Europe, and

caused "a kind of revolution in the street of Rivoli." "It is not a family which travels," said a passer-by maliciously; "it is a regiment which sets out for the war. What things these English need to make them happy!"

While in Paris they again met the young Count d'Orsay, and gave him an invitation to join them, which he promised to do at Avignon. He however met them at Valence first, and again at Avignon, where the Duc de Guiche's parents, the Duc and Duchesse de Grammont, were living. After two months' rest in this town the party moved on, including in their midst Alfred d'Orsay. It has often been said that Alfred went to Italy at the expense of his honour, in that he had to resign his commission in the army at the moment that his regiment was under orders to invade Spain, but Madden, his most important biographer, writing in 1855, says that this is quite untrue that there was no question of his going to Spain at the period of the Italian visit.

Lady Blessington, who, apart from being beautiful and attractive, had already made her début in literature, wrote an account of their journey, entitled "The Idler in Italy," in which she makes scarcely any allusion to D'Orsay, a fact which has occasioned much comment. But we have to remember that Alfred was ten or eleven years younger than Lady Blessington, and that he shared her literary silence with Charles James Mathews, in later years the well-known actor, who for two years was a member of the Earl's household.

Lord Blessington did not remain uniformly abroad as did his wife. In 1823 he was on his estate at Mountjoy, planning the building of a "fairy castle" to please her, and Mathews was with him as the architect. It was then arranged that the latter should go abroad for a few months to study castles there; and in November of

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that year he, in company with his lordship, arrived at the Palazzo Belvedere, Naples, where he "commenced a new existence."

"Lady Blessington," he says, "then in her zenith, and certainly one of the most beautiful as well as one of the most fascinating women of her time, formed the central figure in the little family group assembled within its precincts.

"Count d'Orsay, then a youth of nineteen (he must have been twenty-two), "was the next object of attraction, and I have no hesitation in asserting was the beau idéal of manly dignity and grace. He had not yet assumed the marked peculiarities of dress and deportment which the sophistications of London life subsequently developed. He was the model of all that could be conceived of noble demeanour and youthful candour; handsome beyond all question; accomplished to the last degree; highly educated, and of great literary acquirements; with a gaiety of heart and cheerfulness of mind that spread happiness on all around him. His conversation was brilliant and engaging as well as clever and instructive. He was moreover the best fencer, dancer, swimmer, runner, dresser; the best shot, the best horsethe best draughtsman of his age. Possessed of every attribute that could render his society desirable, I am sure I do not go too far in pronouncing him the perfection of a youthful nobleman.'

Here we have the have the opinion of a contemporary upon D'Orsay in his youth. It in no way fits with the idea of a cunning, far-sighted schemer, while it also to a great extent contradicts the theory that two years earlier D'Orsay had come to England determined to pick up the sceptre dropped by Brummell. Monsieur le Comte de Coutades was certainly a little too subtle