tea-table names whose celebrity would have insured attention in the proudest salons of the metropolis." Crabb Robinson, who was a frequent visitor, used to encounter large parties of sentimental ladies, among them Miss Porter, Miss Landon, and the "eccentric but amiable" Miss Wesley,—John Wesley's niece,—who prided herself upon being broad-minded enough to have friends of varying religions, and who, having written two unread novels, remarked complacently to Miss Edgeworth, "We sisters of the quill ought to know one another."
The formidable Lady de Crespigny of Campion Lodge was also Miss Benger's condescending friend and patroness, and this august matron—of imperious temper and insipid mind—was held to sanctify in some mysterious manner all whom she honored with her notice. The praises lavished upon Lady de Crespigny by her contemporaries would have made Hypatia blush, and Sappho hang her head. Like Mrs. Jarley, she appears to have been "the delight of the nobility and gentry." She corresponded, so we are told, with the literati of England; she published, like a British Cornelia, her letters of counsel to her son; she was "courted by the gay and admired by the clever," and she mingled at Campion Lodge "the festivity of fashionable parties with the pleasures of intellectual society, and the comforts of domestic peace."
To this array of feminine virtue and feminine authorship Lamb was singularly unresponsive. He was not one of the literati honored by Lady de Crespigny's correspondence. Lie eluded the society of Miss Porter, though she was held to be handsome—for a novelist. ("The only literary lady I ever knew," writes Miss Mitford, "who didn't look like a scarecrow to keep birds from cherries.") He said unkindly to Miss Landon that, if she belonged to him, he would lock her up and feed her on bread and water until she left off writing poetry. And for Miss Wesley he entertained a cordial animosity, only one degree less lively than his sentiments towards Miss Benger. Miss Wesley had a lamentable habit of sending her effusions to be read by reluctant men of letters. She asked Lamb for Coleridge's address, which he, to divert the evil from his own head, cheerfully gave. Coleridge, very angry, reproached his friend for this disloyal baseness; but Lamb, with the desperate instinct of self-preservation, refused all promise of amendment. "You encouraged that mopsey Miss Wesley to dance after you," he wrote tartly, "in the hope of having her nonsense put into a nonsensical Anthology. We have pretty well shaken her off by that simple expedient of referring her to you; but there are more burrs in the wind." . . . "Of all God's creatures," he cries again in an acme of ill humor, "I detest letters-affecting, authors-hunting ladies." Alas for Miss Benger when she hunted hard, and the quarry turned at bay!
An atmosphere of inexpressible dreariness hangs over the little coterie of respectable, unilluminated writers, who, to use Lamb's priceless phrase, encouraged one another in mediocrity. A vapid propriety, a mawkish sensibility, were their substitutes for real distinction of character or mind. They read Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin's books, but would not know the author; and when, years later, Mrs. Gaskell presented the widowed Mrs. Shelley to Miss Lucy Aikin, that outraged spinster turned her back upon the erring one, to the profound embarrassment of her hostess. Of Mrs. Inchbald, we read in Public Characters for 1811: "Her moral qualities constitute her principal excellence; and though useful talents and personal accomplishments, of themselves, form materials for an agreeable picture, moral character gives the polish which fascinates the heart." The conception of goodness then in vogue is pleasingly illustrated by a passage from one of Miss Elizabeth Hamilton's books, which Miss Benger in her biography of that lady (now lapsed and lost to fame) quotes appreciatively:
"It was past twelve o'clock. Already had the active and judicious Harriet performed every domestic task; and, having completely regulated the family economy for the day, was quietly seated at work with her aunt and sister, listening to Hume's History of England, as it was read to her by some orphan girl whom she had herself instructed."
So truly ladylike had the feminine mind grown by this time that the very
