Little Memoirs of the 19th Century

潪Little Memoirs of the 19th Century [with accents]

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century
by George Paston Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook.
This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project Gutenberg file. Please do not remove it. Do not change or edit the header without written permission.
Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file. Included is important information about your specific rights and restrictions in how the file may be used. You can also find out about how to make a donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved.
**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****
Title: Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century
Author: George Paston
Release Date: October, 2004 [EBook #6756] [Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on January 23, 2003]
Edition: 10
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LITTLE MEMOIRS OF THE 19TH C. ***

Produced by Steve Schulze, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team. This file was produced from images generously made available by the CWRU Preservation Department Digital Library

LITTLE MEMOIRS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
BY GEORGE PASTON
1902

PREFACE
_For these sketches of minor celebrities of the nineteenth century, it has been my aim to choose subjects whose experiences seem to illustrate the life--more especially the literary and artistic life--of the first half of the century; and who of late years, at any rate, have not been overwhelmed by the attentions of the minor biographer. Having some faith in the theory that the verdict of foreigners is equivalent to that of contemporary posterity, I have included two aliens in the group. A visitor to our shores, whether he be a German princeling like Pückler-Muskau, or a gilded democrat like N. P. Willis, may be expected to observe and comment upon many traits of national life and manners that would escape the notice of a native chronicler.
Whereas certain readers of a former volume--'Little Memoirs of the Eighteenth Century'--seem to have been distressed by the fact that the majority of the characters died in the nineteenth century, it is perhaps meet that I should apologise for the chronology of this present volume, in which all the heroes and heroines, save one, were born in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. But I would venture to submit that a man is not, necessarily, the child of the century in which he is born, or of that in which he dies; rather is he the child of the century which sees the finest flower of his achievement._

CONTENTS
BENJAMIN ROBERT HAYDON,
LADY MORGAN (SYDNEY OWENSON)
NATHANIEL PARKER WILLIS
LADY HESTER STANHOPE
PRINCE PüCKLER-MUSKAU IN ENGLAND
WILLIAM AND MARY HOWITT

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
BENJAMIN ROBERT HAYDON,
LADY MORGAN
NATHANIEL PARKER WILLIS
LADY HESTER STANHOPE ON HORSEBACK
LADY HESTER STANHOPE IN EASTERN COSTUME
PRINCE PüCKLER-MUSKAU
MARY HOWITT

BENJAMIN ROBERT HAYDON
PART I
If it be true that the most important ingredient in the composition of the self-biographer is a spirit of childlike vanity, with a blend of unconscious egoism, few men have ever been better equipped than Haydon for the production of a successful autobiography. In na?ve simplicity of temperament he has only been surpassed by Pepys, in fulness of self-revelation by Rousseau, and his Memoirs are not unworthy of a place in the same category as the Diary and the Confessions. From the larger public, the work has hardly attracted the attention it deserves; it is too long, too minute, too heavily weighted with technical details and statements of financial embarrassments, to be widely or permanently popular. But as a human document, and as the portrait of a temperament, its value can hardly be overestimated; while as a tragedy it is none the less tragic because it contains elements of the grotesque. Haydon set out with the laudable intention of writing the exact truth about himself and his career, holding that every man who has suffered for a principle, and who has been unjustly persecuted and oppressed, should write his own history, and set his own case before his countrymen. It is a fortunate accident for his readers that he should have been gifted with the faculty of picturesque expression and an exceptionally keen power of observation. If not a scholar, he was a man of wide reading, of deep though desultory thinking, and a good critic where the work of others was concerned. He seems to have desired to conceal nothing, nor to set down aught in malice; if he fell into mistakes and misrepresentations, these were the result of unconscious prejudice, and the exaggerative tendency of a brain