nrietta Temple. Willis says:

In a long library, lined alternately with splendidly bound books and
mirrors, and with a deep window of the breadth of the room opening upon
Hyde Park, I found Lady Blessington alone. The picture, to my eye, as
the door opened, was a very lovely one--a woman of remarkable beauty,
half buried in a fauteuil of yellow satin, reading by a magnificent
lamp suspended from the center of the arched ceiling. Sofas, couches,
ottomans, and busts, arranged in rather a crowded sumptuousness through
the room; enameled tables, covered with expensive and elegant trifles
in every corner, and a delicate white hand in relief on the back of a
book, to which the eye was attracted by the blaze of diamond rings.

All this "crowded sumptuousness" was due to the taste of Lady
Blessington. Amid it she received royal dukes, statesmen such as
Palmerston, Canning, Castlereagh, Russell, and Brougham, actors such as
Kemble and Matthews, artists such as Lawrence and Wilkie, and men of
letters such as Moore, Bulwer-Lytton, and the two Disraelis. To
maintain this sort of life Lord Blessington raised large amounts of
money, totaling about half a million pounds sterling, by mortgaging his
different estates and giving his promissory notes to money-lenders. Of
course, he did not spend this vast sum immediately. He might have lived
in comparative luxury upon his income; but he was a restless, eager,
improvident nobleman, and his extravagances were prompted by the
urgings of his wife.

In all this display, which Lady Blessington both stimulated and shared,
there is to be found a psychological basis. She was now verging upon
the thirties--a time which is a very critical period in a woman's
emotional life, if she has not already given herself over to love and
been loved in return. During Lady Blessington's earlier years she had
suffered in many ways, and it is probable that no thought of love had
entered her mind. She was only too glad if she could escape from the
harshness of her father and the cruelty of her first husband. Then came
her development into a beautiful woman, content for the time to be
languorously stagnant and to enjoy the rest and peace which had come to
her.

When she married Lord Blessington her love life had not yet commenced;
and, in fact, there could be no love life in such a marriage--a
marriage with a man much older than herself, scatter-brained, showy,
and having no intellectual gifts. So for a time she