Laman Blanchard

“ We were, perhaps, more astonished at the first, because we hardly expected such prose from such a poet; but it promised more for the future, and as 'Francesca' is the future of that period, we in some degree looked forward to the beauties we have found. We know not where, or how, the female writers of our time procure their insight into human nature; Miss Landon reads hearts and motives, as men read books and pamphlets, and reads them truly; her delineations are perfect—her sketches full of the truth and vigour of nature.
"Her range in prose is more extensive than her range in poetry. ”

“ Ah, my dear kind friend, I thought I loved you very dearly in England, I love you much more here. I do not the least feel the want of society. I should regret to form new friendships, my heart is quite full. I should have written to Dr. Thomson, but have only time to send my kindest, my most grateful regards; my medicine-chest has been invaluable. As to myself, I have not been so well for years; my old complaint is painful, but merely local; one small abscess forms after another in my ear, and is there any remedy for excruciating faceache? ”

“ Amongst the sketches, real and imaginary, we trace resemblances to many of her literary contemporaries; of whom several had to acknowledge in her commentaries the candid critic, or the partial friend. From these gay and sprightly delineations of life, the work deepens, in the last half of it, into a tale of sorrow and sensibility, exhibiting a quick insight into much that is most hidden, as well as a high appreciation of all that is most lofty, in the character of her own sex—a tale written in its lighter parts with natural grace, and in its more elevated passages with earnestness and power. ”

“ Francesca has nothing in common with the Court of the youthful Louis the Fourteenth, but Miss Landon has. We are, consequently, taken there; and nothing can be better than the scenes we are suffered to have part in. They are a delicious mixture of the imaginative and real. What a gorgeous tapestry she unrolls to introduce us to a more gorgeous company within; and with what brilliant truth she realizes them—what a nice perception of the various shades of character, yet all of the Court—courtly. In the most real things that are said or done, there would seem to be nothing real. ”

“ Look to the glowing and impassioned pages of the "Improvvisatrice;" admire all that is naturally musical in the verse, beautiful in the romance of affection, rich and graceful in the imagery; and then measure her success by the calmer and deeper tenor, the bolder combinations of thought, the loftier pictures, and the nobler purposes of her best poems in the "New Monthly," and the "Drawing-room Scrap-book." The idea became purer as her knowledge of the actual advanced; and her dreams deepened in loveliness from her intercourse with the world. ”

“ Letitia Elizabeth Landon.
We have now approached a period when all speculation becomes more or less vain, and when our course must be confined as much as possible to the relation of facts and circumstances, deeply mournful in themselves, and rendered doubly so, first, by the mystery in which they have been shrouded, and next, by the surmises that have been formed in connection with them. Fiction can never have a tragedy so horrible as that which the imagination often builds on unconnected and disputable facts, or on the partial knowledge of a melancholy truth. ”

“ We believe the consciousness we speak of in Miss Landon, from these evidences of her writing, to be of a much more generous, though of a scarcely less mistaken order. She suffers, in fact, from a sensibility too extreme—from an acute and even morbid feeling of all that relates to her own impressions, or to the objects and events of her own life. No single feeling they may have left seems to have been forgotten. No object or event that has caused her an emotion seems to have been effaced. Every such emotion, indeed, has worked itself into a passion—and over passions how vain is forced control. ”

“ But in prose she lives with us—now sanctifying—now satirizing—now glittering with the French in their most brilliant court, playing with diamonds, and revelling in wit—then reposing on one of the finest creations that human genius ever called into existence—the holy friendship of Guido and Francesca. The whole range of modern fiction offers nothing like the portraiture of these two cousins; it is at once beautiful and sublime, and yet perfectly natural and true;—the skill of the woman is admirably developed in this particular creation. ”

“ To any friend to whom you may have stated our engagement, I cannot object to your stating the truth. Do every justice to your own kind and generous conduct. I am placed in a most cruel and difficult position. Give me the satisfaction of, as far as rests with myself, having nothing to reproach myself with. The more I think, the more I feel I ought not—I cannot—allow you—to unite yourself with one accused of—I cannot write it. The mere suspicion is dreadful as death. ”

“ Thomson; first, because I wished to be able to tell you I had taken some steps towards change; and I also wished, if possible, to subdue the bitterness and indignation of feelings not to be expressed to one so kind as yourself. I must own I have succeeded better in the first than the last. I think of the treatment I have received until my very soul writhes under the powerlessness of its anger. It is only because I am poor, unprotected, and dependent on popularity, that I am a mark for all the gratuitous insolence and malice of idleness and ill-nature. ”

“ In what do I differ from the actual experience of the past—the future has to teach us its lessons yet—when I paint ambition as a vain delusion, love as a still vainer, and genius as making its own misery? Moreover, who shall deny that wherever Nature has been most prodigal in her gifts, there Fortune has been almost sure to thwart with adverse circumstances? Who are the most contented people you know? ”

“ It would be an endless task to recount the instances of personal tribute and congratulation from those whose "breath is renown," which this production won for its delighted author. Enough, that the public was her patron; that several editions were rapidly sold; and that the tide of fortune began to flow in with that of fame. But not a day did she allow herself to pause in the enjoyment of these new delights, and the advantages they were bringing to those of whom she always thought more than of herself. Her imagination would know no rest. ”

“ Pardon me if there appear anything like self-ostentation, when I say I believe there are very few left to themselves, pressed by many difficulties on the one hand, and surrounded by every sort of flattery on the other, that would have acted, as I can fearlessly say I have done. What has my life been? one, quiet, very laborious, and inoffensive. I never have had a friend but what I made for myself, and I am not aware that I ever lost one through anything they ever saw reprehensible in my conduct. ”

“ I might say, look back at every action of my life—ask every friend I have—but what answer can I give, or what security have I against the assertion of a man's vanity, or the slander of a vulgar woman's tongue? I feel that to give up all idea of a near and dear connection, is as much my duty to myself as to you. Why should you be exposed to the annoyance—the mortification of having the name of the woman you honour with your regard, coupled with insolent insinuation?—you never would bear it. ”

“ It is impossible not to be struck with the profusion in which they were poured forth. Five or six snatches of song in a week, few of them without some charm of tenderness or fancy, or a brief tale of struggling passion, delineating some chivalrous character, and abounding in the picturesque—these were read in many quarters with the admiration which glances over defects and dwells on the result—the general image of beauty presented to the mind. ”

“ It is not vanity when I say, their success is their fault. When my 'Improvvisatrice' came out, nobody discovered what is now alleged against it. I did not take up a review, a magazine, a newspaper, but if it named my book it was to praise 'the delicacy,' 'the grace,' 'the purity of feminine feeling' it displayed. . . . . . But success is an offence not to be forgiven. To every petty author, whose works have scarce made his name valuable as an autograph, or whose unsold editions load his bookseller's shelves—I am a subject of envy—and what is envy but a name for hatred? ”

“ They are human beings, and yet they are courtiers—they seem, on all truthful and material points, to wink and shut their apprehensions up, and yet how full of apprehensions they are—even how wise, 'seeing through all things with their half-shut eyes.' We never saw court-scenes drawn so completely to the life as they are drawn in 'Francesca Carrara.'
"The whole book, indeed, why should we hesitate to say, notwithstanding that we feel its dangerous tendency, is a book of remarkable power and genius. ”

“ Maclean meditated resuming his official appointment at Cape Coast Castle, and that her marriage would be speedily followed by her departure from the shores of England. On what shores to find a home! To the husband such a change must be a magical one. What transition from gloom to gaiety, from cold and darkness to sunshine, could, equal the possession of such a companion in the eyes of one accustomed to a total deprivation of the society of European women. ”

“ The passions are kept constantly at work—the pulse that agitates them never ceases to beat. We feel this whether we follow the patient yet passionate sufferings of Guido, the divine truth, and the holy affections of Francesca, or the high-aimed coquetry, the sublime selfishness of the Mancini. We yield to them as they severally move us, unable to reason out of influence the genius which gives birth to all—so various in its powers, so complicated and full of contrast in its sympathies. ”

“ I love Miss Landon—for in her genius does the work of duty, the union of the two is "beautiful exceedingly," and virtue is its own reward; far beyond the highest meed of praise ever bestowed by critic—though round her fair forehead is already wreathed the immortal laurel. ”

“ If he could not pronounce every set of verses to be a poem, he could well discern that nobody but a poet had written them. If there were not evidences of the power and mastery of the divine art, they were proofs of a love of it too intense to fail in working out some of the sweetest of its objects. As he felt he spoke; the encouragement had an instant effect; and the "Child of Song" had the delight, not long after, of seeing some of her verses included among the original poetry of the influential and fame-dispensing "Literary Gazette." ”

“ It is much, to be admired and esteemed by many; it is more, to have been truly beloved by a few; and both these fortunes met in the destiny of L. E. L. It was her desert, and no more.
The qualities which claim our admiration, so far from being those with which the public were most familiar, were perhaps those which she least publicly exhibited. She did better justice to her moral than to her intellectual gifts. To her genius, exercised either in poetry or prose, she was only just learning to do justice when she died ”

“ If any misfortunes happen, I beg I may hear of them; as to any good fortune, as I am perfectly sure it will not concern me, you may keep it a fountain sealed, for I am grown very envious. I am very comfortable here. I cannot, though I wish, be insensible to so much affectionate kindness; . . . . but after all, what is affection, but another of those cheats which make present life distasteful to us by comparison with the future? ”

“ I am very well and very happy; my only regret—the emerald ring that I fling into the dark sea of life, to propitiate fate—is the constant sorrow I feel whenever I think of those whose kindness is so deeply treasured. I was wretchedly ill during the whole of the voyage. ”

“ The keen feeling—the generous enthusiasm—the lofty aspiration—and the delicate perception—are given but to make the possessor unfitted for her actual position. It is well; such gifts, in their very contrast to the selfishness and the evil with which they are surrounded, inform us of another world—they breathe of their home, which is Heaven! the spiritual and the inspired in this life but fit us to believe in that which is to come. ”

“ The purposes of life remain while life remains to us—the memory of what has been already done by man, and the thought of 'all that yet remains for man to do,' towards the realization of the happiness of the world. It is surely better to inspire us with the hope and the gladness of these things, than to teach us how to realize a 'vale of tears,' by shedding them."
The reviewer proceeds, with great truth and justice, to say, "In the verses of Miss Landon, moreover, there is always something, cover it as she may with her sombre veil, more nearly akin to cheerfulness than to sorrow. ”

“ Let any one look their own past experience steadily in the face, and what a dark and discouraging aspect will it not present? How many enjoyments have passed away for ever! how much warmth and kindness of feeling! how many generous beliefs! As to love—does it dare to treasure its deepest feelings in the presence of what we call the world? As to friendship—how many would weigh your dearest interest for one instant against the very lightest of their own? ”