single-minded, had never
lived in any English society whatever, and retorted but feebly the
fashionable gossip of the day which reached Mrs. Kemble through the
London post, with her transatlantic reminiscences of Prince Talleyrand
and General Washington. She was grotesque in her manner and appearance,
and a severe thorn in the side of her conventionally irreproachable
companion, who has been known, on the approach of some coroneted
carriage, to observe pointedly, "Mrs. Whitelock, there is an
_ekkipage_." "I see it, ma'am," replied the undaunted Mrs. Whitelock,
screwing up her mouth and twirling her thumbs in a peculiarly emphatic
way, to which she was addicted in moments of crisis. Mrs. Kemble, who
was as quick as Pincher in her movements, rang the bell and snapped out,
"Not at home!" denying herself her stimulating dose of high-life gossip,
and her companion what she would have called a little "genteel
sociability," rather than bring face to face her fine friends and Mrs.
Whitelock's flounced white muslin apron and towering Pamela cap, for she
still wore such things. I have said that Mrs. Kemble was not
(superficially) a vulgar woman, but it would have taken the soul of
gentility to have presented, without quailing, her amazingly odd
companion to her particular set of visitors. A humorist would have found
his account in the absurdity of the scene all round; and Jane Austen
would have made a delicious chapter of it; but Mrs. Kemble had not the
requisite humor to perceive the fun of her companion, her acquaintances,
and herself in juxtaposition. I have mentioned her mode of pronouncing
the word equipage, which, together with several similar peculiarities
that struck me as very odd, were borrowed from the usage of London good
society in the days when she frequented it. My friend, Lord Lansdowne,
never called London any thing but _Lunnon_, and always said _obleege_
for oblige, like the Miss Berrys and Mrs. F---- and other of their
contemporaries, who also said _ekkipage_, _pettikits_, _divle_. Since
their time the pronunciation of English in good society, whose usage is
the only acknowledged law in that matter, and the grammatical
construction of the language habitual in that same good society, has
become such as would have challenged the severest criticism, if we had
ventured upon it in my father's house.

The unsuccessful partnership of my aunts was dissolved. Mrs. Kemble
found the country intolerably dull, declared tha