ART. VI.-Extracts of the Journals and Correspondence of Miss Berry, from the year 1783 to 1852. Edited by Lady Theresa Lewis. London, 1865. TH HESE volumes consist of Diaries, Letters, and Memoranda, left by Miss Mary Berry to the care of the late Sir Frankland Lewis, to be used by him for biographical and literary purposes, as he might think fit. He died without any such publication, and they came into the hands of Sir George Lewis, the scholar, critic, and statesman, whose loss his country has had deeply to deplore. His well-instructed and accomplished widow Lady Theresa Lewis undertook the vicarious work, and within a few weeks of its appearance she too has passed away, leaving only her two brothers, the present Cabinet Ministers, survivors of a numerous family. This record of busy death stands strangely side by side with the one long life of which this book is the memorial, a life that nearly lasted its century, and which included within its observations as memorable a period of our world's history as the sun's light has ever shone upon. There is something in these occasional lengthened spaces of individual existence which seems to make them especially favourable vehicles for biographical narrative: the one figure standing by the protracted course of the stream of time concentrates round itself the images and interests of the past, and acquires an integral value which at any one moment of its being it would hardly have seemed to have possessed: it becomes identified with even more than its own experiences, and is judged not so much by what it was, as by what it might have been. Memoirs therefore such as these do not require the justification of any rare superiority of talent or character, and will be read with pleasure by many on whom the personage whose name they bear leaves little or no impression. There are others, on the contrary, who would have desired a more distinct representation of Miss Berry's personality; but they may remember that Biography is no easier than Life; and that, while every one has attempted to contemplate his own mortal existence and that of others, each as a co-ordinate whole, with its special character, its individual meaning, its exceptional moral, he has been constantly foiled by his inability to comprehend all the fragments before him and compelled to content himself either with a vague delineation which he leaves to be filled up by other thoughts and other experiences, or by a work of Art, which he knows to be the child and creature of his own imagination. When Plutarch placed placed in noble array for the contemplation of ages to come his images of heroes and sages, or when Dr. Johnson drew that gallery of poets, so many of whom only survive in his portraiture, the writers must have been conscious how little of the real men lay behind those strong or graceful representations, how much that was even faithfully recorded may convey a false impression, how much was inevitably omitted which might contradict every deduction and alter every estimate. Thus, in these later days of literature, while we are more and more thirsting for what is most true in humanity, and ever widening our interests in the adventures and vicissitudes of mankind, we receive unwillingly those biographies in which the artist is predominant, even when agreeably and skilfully executed; and we are very indulgent with any congeries of materials out of which we can ourselves embody some living personality, which, either for its own sake or by its contingencies and surroundings, challenges our attention or deserves our regard. It is therefore with diffidence and doubt that we attempt, from the motley materials of this book, to draw even an accurate sketch of the lady whom our generation mainly remembers as the centre of a most pleasant social circle, and to trace by what combination of circumstances and character she came to live an almost public life without forfeiting or infringing the conditions of a simple and unostentatious existence, and to die amid the affectionate regrets of the foremost men of our own day, after having been courted by Horace Walpole and having refused to be introduced to Dr. Johnson. There always seems something patriarchal in relation to ourselves, in persons who have lived to the present generation from before the French Revolution. That deluge has left a strait behind it, separating the historical worlds, and those who have been on the other side of it seem to have enjoyed a double life. Miss Berry's youth witnessed the great century of common sense and chief era of the liberation of the human mind closing in an auto-da-fé of political fanaticism, which still affects the imagination of mankind: she was the living tradition of a world of shattered hopes, dispersed illusions, and drifted philosophies. The personal circumstances of her girlhood were singularly unpropitious. To the daily troubles of genteel poverty was added the continuous gloom of a domestic disappointment, her father having been at one time the supposed heir of a wealthy Scotch uncle, and afterwards supplanted by a more active, and (according to Miss Berry) a less scrupulous brother. Of her mother she had one glim mering infantine recollection, a pale figure in a green dress, who had left little other remembrance in the family than that she had prayed that her children might be endowed with a vigorous character, character, an aspiration which in Mary's case was undoubtedly realised. The father could not impart to this desolate home either useful occupation or pleasant companionship; and the young ladies do not seem to have enjoyed any advantages of instruction beyond the most ordinary teaching of their class in that not very intellectual time. When Mr. Berry first settled in the north of Yorkshire, Lady Percy, who lived at the neighbouring great house at Stanwick, formed a kind of friendship with his wife; but this was not continued to the daughters, nor would it have been of much use if it had been, for the lady was soon after divorced on account of her intimacy with a Mr. Bird. Occasional visits to their cousins, the Cayleys, a family which for many generations has borne a stamp of much talent and originality, seem to have been the only opportunities either for cultivation of intellect or development of character afforded to them; and yet, by the time when an increase of income consequent on the uncle's death, enabled them to make a tour on the Continent, they were not only sufficiently well-informed to enjoy fully all the novelties and associations of travel, but so distinguished by their manners and conversation, combined with much personal beauty, that they were at once admitted to the best society, wherever they might find themselves, and laid the foundation of that social popularity and respect of which these volumes are the record. A sufficient command of the Latin classics to give a scholarly turn to their language, without a taint of pedantry; a familiarity with the French tongue, which throughout life made the society of foreigners as easy to them as that of their countrymen; a thorough understanding of their own language and literature, as exhibited in its best and purest models, which shone in all their conversation, and enabled them in mature years to express themselves on paper in a forcible, judicious, and graceful style; an adequate study of the principles of Art, combined with a fair facility of practice,-these were the results of the self-culture which the Misses Berry acquired in a remote provincial home, and which they might well have regarded through the long vista of years, not with the bitter remembrances of toil, effort, and privation, but with a legiti mate pride in the conquests of talents and will over adverse fortunes, and with a grateful consciousness of the mental faculties that could do so much for themselves, and needed so little obligation to others. The Journal of her first foreign tour, which such a young woman might write, must naturally be intended for her own pleasure and reference, or, at most, for the perusal of intimate friends; and the reproduction of it, at something more than eighty years' years' interval, has just the interest of the distance of time and nothing more. There are names there fresh which this generation can just remember-such as M. de Staël consulting her on his marriage with Mdlle. Necker; there are incidents of hard travel over paths now easy and familiar-such as the journey to Chamouni on four planks under a canvas roof; there are some few traces of old-world manners, such as the ballets at the Neapolitan Theatre, where the Queen appeared on the stage in the character of Ceres and the Kings of Naples and Sweden as Lapland-hunters pursuing their courtiers disguised as bears, which are curious to recall; but, on the whole, the object would have been better secured by a few judicious extracts, than by above a hundred pages, which no one will read consecutively. Two years after their return to England the Berry family took a house on Twickenham Common-a most important incident in their destiny-for in the autumn of 1788, at the house of Lady Herries, wife of the banker in St. James's Street, they were introduced to Mr. Horace Walpole, the finest of fine gentlemen and fine writers, the prince and patriarch of Dilettanti, the reviver of supposed Gothic architecture, and the lineal representative of one of the greatest of English names. The first night he met them he avoided their acquaintance with a characteristic reserve: he had heard so much in their praise, that he concluded they must be all pretence;' but the second time, in a very small company, he sat by Mary, and found her an angel inside and out.' He soon did not know which sister he liked best, except that 'Mary's face was formed for a sentimental novel, but ten times fitter for a fifty times better thing-genteel comedy.' He could give her no higher praise-Genteel Comedy was his ideal of life; and from that day to the close of his own he acted the part of the veteran friend and paternal lover to both, with tact, with tenderness, and with fidelity. It is impossible to overrate the value of this association to the Misses Berry's social position, though its influence on their character and pursuits may have been exaggerated. It established and fixed them as personages of the best English society; it gave them all his numerous circle of acquaintances out of which to make their friends, and by its very delicacy and difficulty it exercised and made manifest those sterling qualities of generosity and discretion which underlaid their more prominent attrac tions. To Horace Walpole himself this relation was at once a true intellectual pleasure, and an element of moral sanity in his declining years which, to judge from such compositions as his 'Hasty "Hasty Productions,'* was seriously required. The familiarity of these ladies with continental literature and manners made their intimacy especially agreeable to the correspondent of Sir Horace Mann and the adorer of Madame du Deffand, and their peculiar freedom from petty prejudice or feminine folly enabled him to repeat to 'youth and beauty the compliment he loved to address to the blind and aged object of his affectionate admiration. 'Sit down there, Good Sense!' He found, too, in this sisterhood an ingenious means of expressing the warmth of his attachment, which saved him from the position of an aged wooer, and either lady from the imputation of an interested connexion. They were his 'twin wives.' 'I pique myself,' he writes, on the day of their departure for the continent in 1790, 'on no other philosophy but what a long use and knowledge of the world has given me the philosophy of indifference to most persons and events. I do pique myself on not being ridiculous at this very late period of my life; but when there is not a grain of passion in my affection for you two, and when you both have the good sense not to be displeased at my telling you so (though I hope you would have despised me for the contrary), I am not ashamed to say that your loss is heavy to me.' Not that the suspicions of a scandalous public were altogether eluded, for a newspaper paragraph, soon after his succession to the earldom and an additional estate, having ill-naturedly connected his name with that of his protégée, aroused an amount of indignation hardly commensurate with the offence. In an eloquent letter (October, 1791) Miss Berry's pride reverts to the hereditary injustice which cast its shade over her early life, and she candidly tells him that, 'If our seeking your society is supposed by those ignorant of its value to be with some view beyond its enjoyment, and our situation represented as one which will aid the belief of this to a mean and interested world, I shall think we have perpetual reason to regret the only circumstance in our lives that could be called fortunate.' These expressions, and the whole tenour of Miss Berry's conduct, combined with a circumstance to which we will presently allude, seem to negative the notion prevalent amongst her friends-that she voluntarily declined the advantages of fortune and position which she might have enjoyed as Lord Orford's wife. There is no trace in these papers of any proposal of the kind, and there was in him a sensitive dislike of all rash and exceptional behaviour, and an absence of all sturdy independence of the opinion of the world in which he moved, * Printed 1791. Fortunately the rarest of his works. that |