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. 
215 
