LETTER: To I.P.D.
LONDON, November 17, 1846
My dear Uncle: I cannot help refreshing the remembrance of me with
you and dear Aunty by addressing a separate letter to you. . . .
Yesterday we hailed with delight our letters from home. . . . One
feels in a foreign land the absence of common sympathies and
interests, which always surround us in any part of our own country.
And yet nothing can exceed the kindness with which we have been
received here.
Last evening I went to my first great English dinner and it was a
most agreeable one. . . . It seems a little odd to a republican
woman to find herself in right of her country taking precedence of
marchionesses, but one soon gets used to all things. We sat down to
dinner at eight and got through about ten. When the ladies rose, I
found I was expected to go first. After dinner other guests were
invited and to the first person who came in, about half-past ten,
Lady Palmerston said: "Oh, thank you for coming so early." This
was Lady Tankerville of the old French family of de Grammont and
niece to Prince Polignac. The next was Lady Emily de Burgh, the
daughter of the Marchioness of Clanricarde, a beautiful girl of
seventeen. She is very lovely, wears a Grecian braid round her head
like a coronet, and always sits by her mother, which would not suit
our young girls. Then came Lord and Lady Ashley, Lord Ebrington,
and so many titled personages that I cannot remember half.
The dinner is much the same as ours in all its modes of serving, but
they have soles and turbot, instead of our fishes, and their
pheasants are not our pheasants, or their partridges our partridges.
Neither have we so many footmen with liveries of all colours, or so
much gold and silver plate. . . . The next morning Mr. Bancroft
breakfasted with Dr. Holland to meet the Marquis of Lansdowne alone.
[Thursday] he went down to Windsor to dine with the Queen. He took
out to dinner the Queen's mother, the Duchess of Kent, the Queen
going with the Prince of Saxe-Weimar, who was paying a visit at the
Castle. He talked German to the Duchess during dinner, which I
suspect she liked, for the Queen spoke of it to him afterwards, and
Lord Palmerston told me the Duchess said he spoke very pure German.
While he was dining at Windsor I went to a party all alone at the
Countess Grey's, which I thought required some courage.
Of all the persons I see here the Marquis of Lansdowne excites the
most lively regard. His countenance and manners are full of
benevolence and I think he understands America better than anyone
else of the high aristocracy.
