“...  You cannot imagine what a sensation Bessy excited at the Ball the other night.  She was prettily dressed, and certainly looked very beautiful....  She was very much frightened, but she got through it very well.  She wore a turban that night to please me, and she looks better in it than anything else; for it strikes everybody almost that sees her, how like the form and expression of her face are to Catalani’s, and a turban is the thing for that kind of character.”

Catalani, in Caverford’s portrait, has the rapt eye of the Cumaean sibyl.  One of Moore’s fine friends, an admirer of Bessy’s, speaks to him of her “wild, poetic face,” and the Duchess of Sussex thought her like “Lady Heathcote in the days of her beauty.”  That is putting her very high, for, according to Cosway, Lady Heathcote was a lovely young woman indeed; but the “wild, poetic face” gets us as near as need be.

In 1815 troubles began from which the poor girl was never to be free again.  She lost one of her three little girls, Olivia Byron, for whom the poet had been sponsor. “...  It was with difficulty I could get her away from her little dead baby,” Moore tells his mother, “and then only under a promise that she should see it again last night....”  In 1817, while Moore was in Paris, pursuing his pleasures, another child, Barbara, had a fall, and he came home in August to find her “very ill indeed.”  On September 10th she is still ill, but if she should get a little better, “I mean to go for a day or two to Lord Lansdowne’s to look at a house....  He has been searching his neighbourhood for a habitation for me, in a way very flattering indeed from such a man.”  But he did not go.  September 20th, “It’s all over, my dearest Mother!”

“Poor Bessy,” we read, “neither eats nor sleeps enough hardly to sustain life”:  nevertheless in the first week of October he is at Bowood.  “I arrived here the day before yesterday, and found Rogers, Lord and Lady Kerry, etc.”  He saw Sloperton Cottage and stayed out his week.  Bessy then had to see the cottage, and went—­but not from Bowood.  “Bessy, who went off the night before last to look at the cottage near Lord Lansdowne’s, is returned this morning, after travelling both nights.  Power went with her.”  In a month’s time they were in possession, and Tom vastly set up by the near neighbourhood of his exalted friend.  Not so, however, his Jenny Wren.

“...  We are getting on here as quietly and comfortably as possible, and the only thing I regret is the want of some near and plain neighbours for Bessy to make an intimacy with, and enjoy a little tea-drinking now and then, as she used to do in Derbyshire.  She contrives, however, to employ herself very well without them; and her favourite task of cutting out things for the poor people is here even in greater requisition than we bargained for, as there never was such wretchedness in any place where we have been; and the better class of people (with but one or