CHISWICK 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 1 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 
cirele—a circle which seems to have included no other woman 
179 12° 
