[Fanny's rambling journey to the west with Mrs. Ord was a
pleasant restorative, to mind and body, and bore good fruit
hereafter in the pages, of " The Wanderer." At Bath, in the
course of this journey, she formed an acquaintance equally
interesting and unlooked-for. It was certainly singular, to use
her own words, "that the first visit I should make after leaving
the queen should be to meet the head of the opposition public,
the Duchess of Devonshire!" The famous Whig duchess was then in
her thirty-fifth year. Fanny's description of her personal
charms tallies exactly with the impression which we derive from
her portraits by Reynolds and Gainsborough: that their celebrity
was due rather to expressiveness and animation than to a
countenance regularly beautiful. But the charming duchess,
like most other people, had a skeleton in her closet.
Notwithstanding her high spirits, and "native. cheerfulness,"
"she appeared to me not happy," writes our penetrating Diarist.
What was the skeleton? Not gambling debts, although the duchess
followed the fashion of the day, and Sheridan declared that he
had handed her into her carriage when she was literally sobbing
at her losses. Fanny gives us a hint, slight but unmistakeable.
At their first meeting the duchess was accompanied by another
lady--a beautiful, alluring woman, with keen dark eyes, who
smiled, some one said, "like Circe." Lady Spencer introduced her
daughter to Miss Burney with warm pleasure, and then, "slightly
and as if unavoidably," named the beautiful enchantress--Lady
Elizabeth Foster. It is only necessary to add that in 1809, some
three years after the death of his first wife, the Duchess
Georgiana, the Duke of Devonshire married again, and his second
wife was Lady Elizabeth Foster.-ED.]