Page:Blanchard on L. E. L.pdf/10

10 , an introduction was obtained to the respectable and prosperous house of Adair, the army-agent, in Pall Mall. John Landon was speedily established in the lucrative business of an army-agency, becoming a partner in the house, and at no distant date the possessor of considerable property. Thus settled in life, Mr. Landon married, and with his wife (Catharine Jane Bishop, a lady of Welsh extraction), took up his residence in Hans-place, Chelsea. There, in the house which is now No. 25, their daughter, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, was born, on the 14th of August, 1802. She was the eldest of three children; one, a girl, died in her thirteenth year; the other still survives, the attached brother, and long the inseparable companion of L. E. L.—the Rev. Whittington Henry Landon, M. A.



It is remarkable that the greater portion of L. E. L.'s existence was passed on the spot where she was born. From Hans-place and its neighbourhood she was seldom absent, and then not for any great length of time: until within a year or two of her death she had there found her home; not, indeed, in the house of her birth, but generally close by. Taken occasionally, during the earlier years of childhood, into the country, it was to Hans-place she returned; here some of her school-time was passed; when her parents removed, she yet clung to the old spot, and as her own mistress,