indeed, was the only one who spoke much to
Lady Ludlow.

After we had worked away about an hour
at the bureau, her ladyship said we had done
enough for one day; and as the time was
come for her afternoon ride she left me,
with a volume of engravings from Mr.
Hogarth's pictures on one side of me (I don't
like to write down the names of them, though
my lady thought nothing of it, I am sure)
and on a stand her great prayer-book open at
the evening-psalms for the day, on the other.
But as soon as she was gone, I troubled
myself little with either, but amused myself
with looking round the room at my leisure.
The side on which the fire-place stood, was
all panelled,—part of the old ornaments of
the house, for there was an Indian paper with
birds and beasts, and insects on it, on all the
other sides. There were coats of arms of the
various families with whom the Hanburys had
intermarried all over these panels, and up and
down the ceiling as well. There was very little
looking-glass in the room, though one of the
great drawing-rooms was called the " Mirror
Room," because it was lined with glass which
my lady's great grandfather had brought
from Venice when he was ambassador there.
There were china jars of all shapes and sizes
round and about the room, and some china
monsters, or idols, of which I could never
bear the sight, they were so ugly, though I
think my lady valued them more than all.
There was a thick carpet on the middle of
the floor, which was made of small pieces of
rare wood fitted into a pattern; the doors
were opposite to each other, and were
composed of two heavy tall wings, and opened in
the middle, moving on brass grooves inserted
into the floor—they would not have opened
over a carpet. There were two windows
reaching up nearly to the ceiling, but very
narrow, and with deep window-seats in the
thickness of the wall. The room was full of
scent, partly from the flowers outside, and
partly from the great jars of pot-pourri
inside. The choice of odours was what my
lady piqued herself upon, saying nothing
showed birth like a keen susceptibility of
smell. We never named musk in her
presence, her antipathy to it was so well understood
through the household; her opinion on
the subject was believed to be, that no scent
derived from an animal could ever be of a
sufficiently pure nature to give pleasure to
any person of good family, where, of course,
the delicate perception of the senses had been
cultivated for generations. She would
instance the way in which sportsmen preserve
the breed of dogs who have shown keen
scent; and how such gifts descend for
generations amongst animals, who cannot be
supposed to have anything of ancestral pride, or
hereditary fancies about them. Musk, then,
was never mentioned at Hanbury Court.
No more were bergamot or southern-wood,
although vegetable in their nature. She
considered these two latter as betraying a
vulgar taste in the person who chose to
gather or wear them. She was sorry to
notice sprigs of them in the buttonhole of
any young man in whom she took an interest,
either because he was engaged to a servant of
hers or otherwise, as he came out of church
on a Sunday afternoon. She was afraid that
he liked coarse pleasures, and I am not sure
if she did not think that his preference for
these coarse sweetnesses did not imply a
probability that he would take to drinking.
But she distinguished between vulgar and
common. Violets, pinks, and sweet-briar
were common enough; roses and mignonette,
for those who had gardens, honeysuckle for
those who walked along the bowery lanes;
but wearing them betrayed no vulgarity of
taste; the queen upon her throne might be
glad to smell at a nosegay of these flowers.
A beau-pot (as we called it) of pinks and
roses freshly gathered was placed every
morning that they were in bloom on my
lady's own particular table. For lasting
vegetable odours she preferred lavender and
sweet-woodroof to any extract whatever.
Lavender reminded her of old customs, she
said, and of homely cottage-gardens, and
many a cottager made his offering to her of a
bundle of lavender. Sweet woodroof, again,
grew in wild, woodland places, where the
soil was fine and the air delicate; the poor
children used to go and gather it for her up
in the woods on the higher lands; and for
this service she always rewarded them with
bright, new pennies, of which my lord, her son,
used always to send her down a bagfull fresh
from the Mint in London every February.

Attar of roses, again, she disliked. She
said it reminded her of the city and of
merchants' wives, over-rich, over-heavy in its
perfume. And lilies of the valley somehow
fell under the same condemnation. They
were most graceful and elegant to look at
(my lady was quite candid about this), flower,
leaf, colour—everything was refined about
them but the smell. That was too strong. But
the great hereditary faculty on which my
lady piqued herself, and with reason, for I
never met with any other person who possessed
it, was the power she had of perceiving the
delicious odour arising from a bed of
strawberries in the late autumn, when the leaves
were all fading and dying. Bacon's Essays
was one of the few books that lay about in
my lady's room; and if you took it up and
opened it carelessly, it was sure to fall apart
at his essay on gardens. " Listen," her ladyship
would say, " to what that great
philosopher and statesman says, ' Next to that,'
—he is speaking of violets, my dear,—' is the
musk-rose,' of which you remember the
great bush at the corner of the south wall
just by the Blue Drawing-room windows;
that is the old musk-rose, Shakespeare's
muskrose, which is dying out through the kingdom
now. But to return to my Lord Bacon: