It Occurred To Me At The
Time That She Did This In Order To Avoid The Awkwardness Of Sitting
In Manifest Trousers Under The Eye Of An European, But I Can Hardly
Fancy Now That With Her Wilful Nature She Would Have Brooked Such A
Compromise As This.
The woman before me had exactly the person of a prophetess - not,
indeed, of the divine sibyl imagined by Domenichino, so sweetly
distracted betwixt love and mystery, but of a good business-like,
practical prophetess, long used to the exercise of her sacred
calling.
I have been told by those who knew Lady Hester Stanhope
in her youth, that any notion of a resemblance betwixt her and the
great Chatham must have been fanciful; but at the time of my seeing
her, the large commanding features of the gaunt woman, then sixty
years old or more, certainly reminded me of the statesman that lay
dying {15} in the House of Lords, according to Copley's picture.
Her face was of the most astonishing whiteness; {16} she wore a
very large turban, which seemed to be of pale cashmere shawls, so
disposed as to conceal the hair; her dress, from the chin down to
the point at which it was concealed by the drapery which she held
over her lap, was a mass of white linen loosely folding - an
ecclesiastical sort of affair, more like a surplice than any of
those blessed creations which our souls love under the names of
"dress" and "frock" and "boddice" and "collar" and "habit-shirt"
and sweet "chemisette."
Such was the outward seeming of the personage that sat before me,
and indeed she was almost bound by the fame of her actual
achievements, as well as by her sublime pretensions, to look a
little differently from the rest of womankind.
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