It is very common for a mother and daughter to live during many years of life together in as close companionship as I lived with my mother, but it is not common for a son to do so.  During many years, and many, many journeyings, and more tete-a-tete walks, and yet more of tete-a-tete home hours, we were inseparable companions and friends.  I can truly say that, from the time when we put our horses together on my return from Birmingham to the time of my marriage, she was all in all to me!  During some four or five days in the early time of our residence at Florence I thought I was going to lose her, and I can never forget the blank wretchedness of the prospect that seemed to be before me.

She had a very serious illness, and was, as I had subsequently reason to believe, very mistakenly treated.  She was attended by a practitioner of the old school, who had at that time the leading practice in Florence.  He was a very good fellow, and an admirable whist player; and I do not think the members of our little colony drew a sufficiently sharp line of division between his social and his professional qualifications.  He was, as I have said, essentially a man of the (even then) old school, and retained the old-fashioned general practitioners phraseology.  I remember his once mortally disgusting an unhappy dyspeptic old lady by asking her, “Do we go to our dinner with glee?” As if the poor soul had ever done anything with glee!

This gentleman had bled my mother, and had appointed another bleeding for the evening.  I believe she would assuredly have died if that had been done, and I attribute to Lord Holland the saving of her.  Her doctor had very wrongly resisted the calling in of other English advice, professional jealousy, and indeed enmity, running high just then among us.  Lord Holland came to the house just in the nick of time; and over-ruling authoritatively all the difficulties raised by the Esculapius in possession of the field, insisted on at once sending his own medical attendant.  The result was the immediate administration of port wine instead of phlebotomy, and the patient’s rapid recovery.

My mother was at the time far past taking any part in the discussion of the medical measures to be adopted in her case.  But I am not without a suspicion that she too, if she could have been consulted, would have sided with phlebotomy and whist, as against modern practice unrelieved by any such alleviation.  For the phlebotomist had been a constant attendant at her Friday night whist-table; and as it was she lost him, for he naturally was offended at her recovery under rival hands.