Page:Memoirs of the Lady Hester Stanhope.djvu/190

 He was handsome in his person, rather tall, and his demeanour was suitable to his station in life. In a word, he was born to "achieve greatness."

General L. had now lived five and twenty years on Lady Hester's bounty. His family, consisting of two or three sons and some daughters, were left with not very bright prospects in France. Lady Hester Stanhope had at different times employed persons to assist them, and, to my knowledge, had sent 1000 francs through a merchant's hands at Marseilles, besides other sums, of which I have heard her speak. She also paid for the education of one daughter some years. In 1825, one of the sons, who had by his military services obtained the rank of captain in Napoleon's Imperial Guard, being left, by the fall of that Emperor, in inactivity, resolved to visit Syria, to see his father.

General L.'s intellects were so far weakened, that nothing which happened to him personally seemed to affect him, only as it verified some of his favourite predictions, drawn from texts in the Bible. He therefore beheld his son's arrival with indifference, as far as paternal affection went, but discovered in it other bearings, of immense importance in the political changes that were at hand. Not so Lady Hester Stanhope: she knew that the general had a right to the revenue of a whole village in the Mahratta country,