beauty, who was kind-hearted and good-natured to all but her natural enemies (i.e. the members of her own London society), exerted all her interest with her admirers in high place in favor of Cunard, and had made this very dinner for the express purpose of bringing her provincial protege into pleasant personal relations with Lord Lansdowne and Lord Normanby, who were likely to be of great service to him in the special object which had brought him to England.  The only other individual I remember at the dinner was that most beautiful person, Lady Harriet d’Orsay.  Years after, when the Halifax projector had become Sir Samuel Cunard, a man of fame in the worlds of commerce and business of New York and London, a baronet of large fortune, and a sort of proprietor of the Atlantic Ocean between England and the United States, he reminded me of this charming dinner in which Mrs. Norton had so successfully found the means of forwarding his interests, and spoke with enthusiasm of her kind-heartedness as well as her beauty and talents; he, of course, passed under the Caudine Forks, beneath which all men encountering her had to bow and throw down their arms.  She was very fond of inventing devices for seals, and other such ingenious exercises of her brains, and she gave ——­ a star with the motto, “Procul sed non extincta,” which she civilly said bore reference to me in my transatlantic home.  She also told me, when we were talking of mottoes for seals and rings, that she had had engraved on a ring she always wore the name of that miserable bayou of the Mississippi—­Atchafalaya—­where Gabriel passes near one side of an island, while Evangeline, in her woe-begone search, is lying asleep on the other; and that, to her surprise, she found that the King of the Belgians wore a ring on which he had had the same word engraved, as an expression of the bitterest and most hopeless disappointment.

In 1845 I passed through London, and spent a few days there with my father, on my way to Italy.  Mrs. Norton, hearing of my being in town, came to see me, and urged me extremely to go and dine with her before I left London, which I did.  The event of the day in her society was the death of Lady Holland, about which there were a good many lamentations, of which Lady T——­ gave the real significance, with considerable naivete:  “Ah, poore deare Ladi Ollande!  It is a grate pittie; it was suche a pleasant ’ouse!” As I had always avoided Lady Holland’s acquaintance, I could merely say that the regrets I heard expressed about her seemed to me only to prove a well-known fact—­how soon the dead were forgotten.  The real sorrow was indeed for the loss of her house, that pleasantest of all London rendezvouses, and not for its mistress, though those whom I then heard speak were probably among the few who did regret her.  Lady Holland had one good quality (perhaps more than one, which I might have found out if I had known her):  she was a constant and exceedingly warm friend, and extended her regard and remembrance to all whom Lord Holland or herself had ever received with kindness or on a cordial footing.  My brother John had always been treated with great friendliness by Lord Holland, and in her will Lady Holland, who had not seen him for years, left him as a memento a copy, in thirty-two volumes, of the English essayists, which had belonged to her husband.