ed my distaste for the coarse and common
details of my professional duties behind the scenes, and the sham
splendors of the stage. The guests at Heaton of whom I have a distinct
remembrance were Mr. and Lady Harriet Baring, afterward Lord and Lady
Ashburton. I knew them both in after-life, and liked them very much; Mr.
Baring was highly cultivated and extremely amiable; his wife was much
cleverer than he, and in many respects a remarkable woman. The beautiful
sisters, Anne and Isabella Forrester, with their brother Cecil, were at
Heaton at this time. They were celebrated beauties: the elder, afterward
Countess of Chesterfield, was a brunette; the younger, who married
Colonel Anson, the most renowned lady-killer of his day, was a blonde;
and they were both of them exquisitely pretty, and used to remind me of
the French quatrain--

"Vous etes belle, et votre soeur est belle;
Entre vous deux, tout choix serait bien doux.
L'Amour etait blond, comme vous,
Mais il aimait une brune, comme elle."

They had beautiful figures as well as faces, and dressed peculiarly and
so as to display them to the greatest advantage. Long and very full
skirts gathered or plaited all round a pointed waist were then the
fashion; these lovely ladies, with a righteous scorn of all
disfigurement of their beauty, wore extremely short skirts, which showed
their thorough-bred feet and ankles, and were perfectly plain round
their waists and over their hips, with bodies so low on the shoulders
and bosom that there was certainly as little as possible of their
beautiful persons concealed. I remember wishing it were consistent with
her comfort and the general decorum of modern manners that Isabella
Forrester's gown could only slip entirely off her exquisite bust. I
suppose I felt as poor Gibson, the sculptor, who, looking at his friend
and pupil's (Miss Hosmer's) statue of Beatrice Cenci, the back of which
was copied from that of Lady A---- T----, exclaimed in his slow,
measured, deliberate manner, "And to think that the cursed prejudices of
society prevent my seeing that beautiful back!" Count and Countess
Batthyany (she the former widow of the celebrated Austrian general,
Bubna, a most distinguished and charming woman) were visitors at Heaton
at this time, as was also Henry Greville, with whom I then first became
acquainted, and who from that time until his death was my kind and
constant friend. He was for several years attached to the