Page:A happy half-century and other essays.djvu/36

 friend and patroness, and this august matron—of insipid mind and imperious temper—was held to sanctify in some mysterious manner all whom she honoured 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 was 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 honoured by Lady de Crespigny's correspondence. He 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