LITTLEMEMOIRS
NINETEENTHCENTURY
BY GEORGE PASTON
1902
PREFACE
For these sketches of minor celebrities of the nineteenthcentury, it has been my aim to choose subjects whose experiences seem toillustrate the life--more especially the literary and artistic life--ofthe first half of the century; and who of late years, at any rate, havenot been overwhelmed by the attentions of the minor biographer. Havingsome faith in the theory that the verdict of foreigners is equivalent tothat of contemporary posterity, I have included two aliens in the group.A visitor to our shores, whether he be a German princeling likePückler-Muskau, or a gilded democrat like N. P. Willis, may beexpected to observe and comment upon many traits of national life andmanners that would escape the notice of a native chronicler.
Whereas certain readers of a former volume--'Little Memoirs ofthe Eighteenth Century'--seem to have been distressed by the fact thatthe majority of the characters died in the nineteenth century, it isperhaps meet that I should apologise for the chronology of this presentvolume, in which all the heroes and heroines, save one, were born in thelast quarter of the eighteenth century. But I would venture to submitthat a man is not, necessarily, the child of the century in which he isborn, or of that in which he dies; rather is he the child of the centurywhich sees the finest flower of his achievement.
CONTENTS
BENJAMIN ROBERT HAYDON
LADY MORGAN (SYDNEY OWENSON)
NATHANIEL PARKER WILLIS
LADY HESTER STANHOPE
PRINCE PÜCKLER-MUSKAU IN ENGLAND
WILLIAM AND MARY HOWITT
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
BENJAMIN ROBERT HAYDON
LADY MORGAN
NATHANIEL PARKER WILLIS
LADY HESTER STANHOPE ON HORSEBACK
LADY HESTER STANHOPE IN EASTERN COSTUME
PRINCE PÜCKLER-MUSKAU
MARY HOWITT
...