These are interspersed
with a number of philoprogenitive letters to Lady Clarke,--her
Ladyship's sister,--in which, being childless herself, she expends all
her bottled-up maternity on her nephews and nieces. The little pieces of
autobiography scattered here and there are painfully vivacious. The poor
old lady smirks and capers and ogles, until one becomes sick of this
sexagenarian agility. Paris beheld no more melancholy spectacle than
that of poor old Madame Saqui dancing on the tight-rope for a living at
the age of eighty-five, and displaying her withered limbs and long
white hair to a curious public. We do not feel any particular degree
of veneration for that Countess of Desmond "who lived to the age of a
hundred and ten, and died of a fall from a cherry-tree then," as Mr.
Thomas Moore sings. Well, Lady Morgan dances on any amount of literary
tight-ropes, and climbs any number of intellectual cherry-trees. It is
a sight more surprising than pleasant; and her Ladyship must not be
astonished that the critics should not treat her with the respect due to
her age, when she herself labors so hard to make them forget it.
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