GHISWIGK HOUSE 



Lord Spencer, known as " the beautiful Duchess " though, ac- 

 cording to Horace Walpole, she had more charm than beauty. 

 He says of her, " She effaces all without being a beauty ; but her 

 youthful figure, flowing good nature, sense and lively modesty, 

 and modest familiarity, make her . a phenomenon." Elizabeth, 

 Lady Holland, in her journal, edited by the present Lord Ilchester, 

 makes an unflattering reference to the celebrated Duchess when 

 her physical attractions were declining. " Scarcely has she a 

 vestige of those charms that once attracted all hearts. Her figure 

 is corpulent, her complexion coarse : one eye gone, and her neck 

 immense. How frail is the tenure of beauty." After this it is 

 curious to read in the diary, and only a few pages farther on : 

 " A long acquaintance, with me, is a passport to affection." Lady 

 Holland, herself a beauty in her youth when she broke the bonds 

 of an unhappy first marriage for the sake of Lord Holland, ought, 

 even in her private journal, to have written more tenderly of one 

 who had visited her at Holland House, when other ladies of position 

 held aloof. The Duchess was an acknowledged leader of society, 

 and her power was sufficient to achieve the abolition of the hideous 

 fashion of the hoop and the adoption of the graceful costume 

 which we admire so much in the pictures of Reynolds and Gains- 

 borough. Gainsborough, whose brush was " light as the sweep 

 of a cloud, as swift as the flash of a sunbeam," to quote Ruskin's 

 description of his touch, painted her two or three times. He 

 quitted Bath for London in 1774, when Georgiana, a girl of seven- 

 teen, and newly-married, was in the fresh, ripe glory of her beauty. 

 In his portraits of her he could not satisfy himself. ' Her Grace 

 is too hard for me ! " he exclaimed when engaged upon one of 

 these ; and seizing his brush he painted out the mouth, though 

 others had pronounced it lovely. Everybody knows the picture 

 of the Duchess of Devonshire with her child on her knee the 

 little one's hands raised in imitation of its mother. For grace 

 of movement and spontaneity, it is unsurpassed by any of his 

 works. 



The Duchess was remarkable for her strong Whig proclivities, 

 and for the active part she took in Whig propaganda. Charles 

 James Fox, and Sheridan, were among her intimate friends, and 

 she was a conspicuous ornament in the Holland House political 

 circle a circle which seems to have included no other woman 



179 12* 



