serene anxiety on the part for instance of exquisite Mrs.
Thellusson, Mrs. Greville's mother, was by itself a plea for any
privilege one should fancy her perched upon; and I scarce know if this
be more or be less true because the anxiety--at least as I culled its
fragrance--was all about the most secondary and superfluous small
matters alone. It struck me, I remember, as a new and unexpected form of
the pathetic altogether; and there was no form of the pathetic, any more
than of the tragic or the comic, that didn't serve as another pearl for
one's lengthening string. And I pass over what was doubtless the
happiest stroke in the composition, the fact of its involving, as
all-distinguished husband of the other daughter, an illustrious soldier
and servant of his sovereign, of his sovereigns that were successively
to be, than against whose patient handsome bearded presence the whole
complexus of femininities and futilities couldn't have been left in more
tolerated and more contrasted relief; pass it over to remind myself of
how, in my particular friend of the three, the comic and the tragic were
presented in a confusion that made the least intended of them at any
moment take effectively the place of the most. The impression, that is,
was never that of the sentiment operating--save indeed perhaps when the
dear lady applied her faculty for frank imitation of the ridiculous,
which she then quite directly and remarkably achieved; but that she
could be comic, that she _was_ comic, was what least appeased her
unrest, and there were reasons enough, in a word, why her failure of the
grand manner or the penetrating note should evoke the idea of their
opposites perfectly achieved. She sat, alike in adoration and emulation,
at the feet of my admirable old friend Fanny Kemble, the good-nature of
whose consent to "hear" her was equalled only by the immediately
consequent action of the splendidly corrective spring on the part of
that unsurpassed subject of the dramatic afflatus fairly, or, as I
should perhaps above all say, contradictiously provoked. Then aspirant
and auditor, rash adventurer and shy alarmist, were swept away together
in the gust of magnificent rightness and beauty, no scrap of the
far-scattered prime proposal being left to pick up.

Which detail of reminiscence has again stayed my course to the Witley
Villa, when even on the way I quaked a little with my sense of what
_generally_ most awaited or overtook my companion's p