HOLLAND HOUSE AND GARDENS 



this or that, telling Sydney Smith to ring the bell ! " Oh, yes, 

 and shall I sweep the floor too ! " answers that most amiable of 

 wits and when a seat for some late- comer had to be found at the 

 already over-crowded table, bidding Luttrell "make room." "It 

 must certainly be made," he retorts, "for it does not exist." We 

 watch her insisting upon her guests exchanging places so often, 

 that at last Lord Melbourne, exclaiming " I'll be damned if I 

 dine with you at all," marches off in dudgeon. We see her not 

 hesitating to instruct even Sheridan in the niceties of the English 

 language ; and, at a later period, correcting Guizot's pronunciation, 

 and rebuking him for quoting the proverb : " Hell is paved with 

 good intention," because she said " that word, except in an epic, 

 is never heard in good society ; " and snubbing a literary aspirant 

 with the remark : "I hear you are going to publish a poem. 

 Cannot you suppress it ? ' 



I owe the reader an apology perhaps for introducing such well- 

 known stories here. I do so because they may be new to some. 

 But she had her kinder moments ; Lord Jeffreys, of the Edinburgh 

 Review, after a large dinner-party at Holland House in 1840 

 describes his hostess as having been " in great gentleness and 

 softness." 



The poet Campbell, on his first visit to Holland House in 1806, 

 had not known " whether he was standing on his head or his heels," 

 until Charles James Fox, divining his nervousness, walked round 

 with him arm in arm, showing him the wonders of the place. He 

 told his nephew, Lord Holland, that he liked Campbell, he was 

 " so right about Virgil," and asked him down to St. Anne's : two 

 years later we find Campbell again at Kensington, and this time 

 Her Ladyship herself, grown matronly, but still sprightly and 

 handsome, walked about with him for about an hour, showing 

 him the gardens ; and though he found her " a most formidable 

 person, cleverer by many degrees than Buonaparte," she soon 

 set him at his ease so completely, that " never did he feel 

 such self-possession, such a rattle of tongue and spring-tide of 

 conversation, so perfectly joyous." And she herself must have 

 been secretly amused, for Campbell had a strange taste in dress, 

 and according to Byron " dressed to sprucery, as if Apollo had sent 

 him a birthday present." On this occasion he wore, by his own 

 account, a huge cravat resembling a halter. 



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