ul sight to see an angel! There is something so
transcendent and beautiful in them, that a person must be half out of
his senses to brave the sight. For, when you are looking down, and
happen to raise your head, and there is the angel standing before you,
you can't say whether it came up through the earth, or down from the
sky, or how--there he is, and may go in the same way. But angels don't
appear to everybody. You know, doctor, you can't suppose that if you
were a dirty little apothecary, keeping a shop in a narrow street, a
prime minister would waste his time in going to call on you; or that, if
a man is sitting over his glass all the evening, or playing whist, or
lounging all the morning, an angel will come to him. But where there is
a mortal of high rectitude and integrity, then such a being may be
supposed to condescend to seek him out.

"God is my Friend--that is enough; and, if I am to see no happiness in
this world, my share of it, I trust, will be greater in the next, if I
am firm in the execution of those principles which He has inspired me
with."[26]

In reference to her inveterate love of smoking, her physician says,
"Much has been written in prose and verse on the advantages and mischief
of smoking tobacco.... All I can say is, that Lady Hester gave her
sanction to the practice by the habitual use of the long Oriental pipe,
which use dated from the year 1817, or thereabouts. In her bed, lying
with her pipe in her mouth, she would talk on politics, philosophy,
morality, religion, or on any other theme, with her accustomed
eloquence, and closing her periods with a whiff that would have made
the Duchess of Richmond stare with astonishment, could she have risen
from her tomb to have seen her quondam friend, the brilliant ornament of
a London drawing-room, clouded in fumes so that her features were
sometimes invisible. Now, this altered individual had not a covering to
her bed that was not burnt into twenty holes by the sparks and ashes
that had fallen from her pipe; and, had not these coverings been all
woollen, it is certain that, on some unlucky night, she must have been
consumed, bed and all.

"Her bedroom, at the end of every twenty-four hours, was strewed with
tobacco and ashes, to be swept away and again strewed as before; and it
was always strongly impregnated with the fumes.

"The finest tobacco the country could produce, and the cleanest pipes
(for she had a new one almost as often as a fop puts