She
Had A True Relish Of All The Little Pleasures That Promiscuous Society
Affords, And Did Not Underrate Those Talents
Which are better fitted
for the drawing-room than the study." Her warmth of heart and kindness
of disposition, which
Co-operated with her good sense in thus removing
all disagreeable points from her external character, made her the
sincerest of friends, and ever ready to engage in any work of charity
or benevolence.
It would be affectation to attempt in this slight Memoir to elaborate
a picture of the intellectual character of Miss Roberts, cut off,
as she has been, before that character had been fully developed. The
works, upon which her reputation as a writer principally rests, are
not, perhaps, of a quality which calls for any commanding powers
of mind. Her business was with the surfaces of things; her skill
consisted in a species of photography, presenting perfect fac-similes
of objects, animate and inanimate, in their natural forms and hues.
Deep investigations, profound reflections, and laboured and learned
disquisitions, would have defeated the very object of her lively
sketches, which was to make them, not only faithful and exact, but
popular. Of her success in this design, the following testimony from a
competent authority, the Calcutta Literary Gazette, is distinct
and decisive; and with this extract we may fitly close our melancholy
office: "Nothing can be more minute and faithful than her pictures of
external life and manners. She does not, indeed, go much beneath the
surface, nor does she take profound or general views of human nature;
but we can mention no traveller, who has thrown upon the printed page
such true and vivid representations of all that strikes the eye of
a stranger. Her book, entitled Scenes and Characteristics of
Hindostan, is the best of its kind. Other travellers have excelled
her in depth and sagacity of remark, in extent of information, and in
mere force or elegance of style; but there is a vivacity, a delicacy,
and a truth in her light sketches of all that lay immediately before
her, that have never been surpassed in any book of travels that is
at this moment present to our memory. She had a peculiar readiness in
receiving, and a singular power of retaining, first impressions of the
most minute and evanescent nature. She walked through a street or a
bazaar, and every thing that passed over the mirror of her mind left
a clear and lasting trace. She was thus enabled, even years after a
visit to a place of interest, to describe every thing with the same
freshness and fidelity as if she had taken notes upon the spot.
They who have gone over the same ground are delighted to find in
the perusal of her pages their own vague and half-faded impressions
revived and defined by her magic glass, while the novelty and
vividness of her foreign pictures make her home-readers feel that they
are nearly as much entitled to be called travellers as the fair author
herself."
[Footnote A:
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