[Footnote 82:  This article was, of course, written before the war which subsequently broke out between the Bulgarians and their former allies, the Greeks and the Servians.]

XV

WELLINGTONIANA[83]

"The Spectator,” June 21, 1913

In dealing with Lady Shelley’s sprightly and discursive comments upon the current events of her day, we have to transport ourselves back into a society which, though not very remote in point of time, has now so completely passed away that it is difficult fully to realise its feelings, opinions, and aspirations.  It was a time when a learned divine, writing in the Church and State Gazette, had proved entirely to his own satisfaction, and apparently also to that of Lady Shelley, that a “remarkable fulfilment of that hitherto incomprehensible prophecy in the Revelations” had taken place, inasmuch as Napoleon Bonaparte was most assuredly “the seventh head of the Beast.”  It was a time when Londoners rode in the Green Park instead of Rotten Row, and when, in spite of the admiration expressed for the talents of that rising young politician, Mr. Robert Peel, it was impossible to deny that “his birth ran strongly against him”—­a consideration which elicited from Lady Shelley the profound remark that it is “strange to search into the recesses of the human mind.”

Lady Shelley herself seems to have been rather a femme incomprise.  She had lived much on the Continent, and appreciated the greater deference paid to a charming and accomplished woman in Viennese and Parisian society, compared with the boorishness of Englishmen who would not “waste their time” in paying pretty compliments to ladies which “could be repaid by a smile.”  She records her impressions in French, a language in which she was thoroughly proficient.  “Je sais,” she says, “qu’en Angleterre il ne faut pas s’attendre a cultiver son esprit; qu’il faut, pour etre contente a Londres, se resoudre a se plaire avec la mediocrite; a entendre tous les jours repeter les memes banalites et a s’abaisser autant qu’on le peut au niveau des femmelettes avec lesquelles l’on vit, et qui, pour plaire, affectent plus de frivolite qu’elles n’ont reellement.  Le plaisir de causer nous est defendu.”  Nevertheless, however much she may have mentally appreciated the solitude of a crowd, she determined to adapt herself to her social surroundings.  “C’est un sacrifice,” she says, “que je fais a mon Dieu et a mon devoir comme Anglaise.”  Impelled, therefore, alike by piety and patriotism, she cast aside all ideas of leading an eremitic life, plunged into the vortex of the social world, and mixed with all the great men and women of the day.  Of these the most notable was the Duke of Wellington.