up; the Siamese Twins[1]—Bulwer's, I mean—had received due castigation; the last glass of gin-toddy was deftly mixed; or—which is more probable, for the Doctor was an Irishman,—he had for the nonce divested himself of tooth and claw, like the amorous lion of Babrius, and was prostrate before the throne of beauty.
But it is time to ascend to the dry facts of history. Caroline Elizabeth Sarah, Lady Stirling-Maxwell, otherwise and better known as the Hon. Mrs. Norton, was the second daughter of Thomas Sheridan, and granddaughter of the Right Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and his first wife, the celebrated Miss Linley. She was born in 1808; and prematurely stimulated by the sense that she was co-heiress of the family genius, produced, when scarcely out of her teens, a satirical piece, The Dandies' Rout, — not the Dandies' Ball, as Maginn says, which was the work of an earlier writer,— in which the coxcombries of the day were happily touched off by pen and by pencil. By and by (1829) came the Sorrows of Rosalie, which the Ettrick Shepherd so extravagantly lauded in the Noctes Ambrosianæ; and (1831) The Undying One,—a poem founded on that mysterious legend of antiquity which has exercised the genius of C. F. D. Schubart among the Germans, Eugène Sue among the French, and Shelley, Gait, Croly, and in our own immediate day, Moncure D. Conway, among ourselves,—which was praised by Fraser, and thought worthy of the higher commendation of the "blue and yellow."
In 1840, we have The Dream and other Poems, for which the Quarterly hailed her the "Byron of her sex"; in 1845, The Child of the Islands; in 1847, Aunt Carry's Ballads, a book of poems for children; in 1862, The Lady of La Garaye.
In the region of prose fiction, Mrs. Norton was equally successful; her nice discrimination of character, refined satire, sympathy with all that is good and true, and absence of affectation, combining with her clear and elegant style, and a captivating tone of sadness, to give her a high place among the novelists of her day. I can but allude to her sad, sad story, Stuart of Dunleath, 1835 Lost and Saved, 1863; and Old Sir Douglas, 1858, which are her best novels.
Beside these substantive works, Mrs. Norton's anonymous, or scattered contributions to periodicals, home and foreign,—poems, art-criticism, tales, reviews, etc.,—are very numerous; but no attempt can be made to indicate them here. In Macmillan's Magazine, for Jan., 1861, appeared an important letter from her pen, in defence of the character of her grandfather, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, unjustly aspersed, as she contended, by the writers whose pen-names are "Grace and Philip Wharton," in their work entitled The Wits and Beaux of Society. In this letter, she speaks of her projected Lives of the Sheridans, as "a task relinquished, with many others, in the grief caused by the illness and death of her son."
Born to some competence, heir of an illustrious name, dowered with high and diversified talents, and loveliest among the lovely "children of
- ↑ It was from this now forgotten satire, which had been recently reviewed in Fraser, that Maginn got the phrase I have cited above:—
"Here's Lady Gower, a charming face,
To heavenly vision to exhort one;
And here, I think, we seem to trace
A future Boudhist, Nat, in Norton,"
Siamese Twins, p. 122,
