Page:Memoirs of the Lady Hester Stanhope.djvu/47

 little, it is only to pick his brains about whether somebody is likely to live or not: but I am not, and never was, so mean: I always liked people should know their relative situations. Ah! Dr. Turton, or some such man as that, would be perhaps asked now and then to dinner, or to take a walk round the grounds. A doctor's business is to examine the grandes affaires, talk to the nurse, and see that his blister has been well dressed, and not to talk politics, say such a woman is handsome, and chatter about what does not concern him."

Whilst Lady Hester was going on with her strictures on the poor doctors, a favourite theme with her, I produced from the back of a cupboard a miniature print of General Moore, which had been lying at Abra, neglected for some years. She took it from my hand, and, looking at it a little time, she observed that it was an excellent likeness of what he was when he became a weather-beaten soldier: "Before that," said she, "those cheeks were filled out and ruddy, like Mr. Close's at Malta."

After a pause, Lady Hester Stanhope continued: "Poor Charles! My brother Charles one day was disputing with James about his handsome Colonel, and James, on his side, was talking of somebody's leg being handsome, saying he was right, for it had been modelled, and nobody's could be equal to it; when