quite enough for the
major interest what was meant by Lady Waterford's great reputation.
Nothing could in fact have been more informing than so to see what was
meant, than so copiously to share with admirers who had had their vision
and passed on; for if I spoke above of her image as illustrational this
is because it affected me on the spot as so diffusing information. My
impression was of course but the old story--to which my reader will feel
himself treated, I fear, to satiety: when once I had drawn the curtain
for the light shed by this or that or the other personal presence upon
the society more or less intimately concerned in producing it the last
thing I could think of was to darken the scene again. For this right or
this wrong reason then Mrs. Greville's admirable guest struck me as
flooding it; indebted in the highest degree to every art by which a
commended appearance may have formed the habit of still suggesting
commendation, she certainly--to my imagination at least--triumphed over
time in the sense that if the years, in their generosity, went on
helping her to live, her grace returned the favour by paying life back
to them. I mean that she reanimated for the fond analyst the age in
which persons of her type could so greatly flourish--it being ever so
pertinently of her type, or at least of that of the age, that she was
regarded as having cast the spell of genius as well as of beauty. She
painted, and on the largest scale, with all confidence and facility, and
nothing could have contributed more, by my sense, to what I glance at
again as her illustrational value than the apparently widespread
appreciation of this fact--taken together, that is, with one's own
impression of the work of her hand. There it was that, like Mrs.
Greville herself, yet in a still higher degree, she bore witness to the
fine old felicity of the fortunate and the "great" under the "old" order
which would have made it so good then to live could one but have been in
their shoes. She determined in me, I remember, a renewed perception of
the old order, a renewed insistence on one's having come just in time to
see it begin to stretch back: a little earlier one wouldn't have had the
light for this perhaps, and a little later it would have receded too
much.

The precious persons, the surviving figures, who held up, as I may call
it, the light were still here and there to be met; my sense being that
the last of them, at least for any vision of