"DECAYING: LESS CORRUPTION" 251 



Sometimes at the theatre to be seen and saluted by 

 all, sometimes at the palace to be honoured by the 

 King's brother as his countrywoman, sometimes in 

 correspondence with scientific men, and hearing of 

 their achievements, she maintained to the last her 

 cheerful interest in life. Though her eyesight was 

 failing, and she could " hardly find the line again she 

 had just been tracing by feeling on paper," her nephew 

 writes of her in 1832, " She runs about the town with 

 me, and skips up her two pair of stairs as light and 

 fresh at least as some folks I could name, who are not a 

 fourth part of her age. ... In the morning till eleven 

 or twelve she is dull and weary, but as the day 

 advances she gains life, and is quite ' fresh and funny ' 

 at ten or eleven p.m., and sings old rhymes, nay, even 

 dances! to the great delight of all who see her." It 

 is such a picture of four score as Cicero would have 

 been overjoyed to prefix as a frontispiece to his treatise 

 on " Old Age," had it been available in his day. She 

 spoke in her usual spirit of drollery of " her brittle 

 constitution," and looked for it going to pieces in the 

 great heats of summer fourteen years before it did. 

 " My complaint is incurable," she says, " for it is a 

 decay of nature. . . . What a shocking idea it is to be 

 decaying ! decaying ! But, never mind if I am decay- 

 ing here, there will be as Mrs. Maskelyne once was 

 comforting me (on observing my growing lean) the 

 less corruption in my grave ! " But, in view of the 

 end, it is always to " the best and dearest of brothers," 

 to her " dear nephew," and to her namesake, his little 

 daughter, that her thoughts revert. She enjoyed the 

 present ; she revelled and lived in the past. " I have 

 now received in all five letters," she writes to Lady 



