The great Conde, while winning
sieges and battles that surpassed the feats of Greeks and Romans, contrived
to make himself the finest dancer of his day, and won more admiration
in high-bred circles by his graceful movements, which every one could
understand and admire, than by prodigies of valour at Dunkirk or
Nordlingen."
The above was one of Lady Fareham's most serious letters. Her pen was
exercised, for the most part, in a lighter vein. She wrote of the Court
beauties, the Court jests--practical jokes some of them, which our finer
minds of to-day would consider in execrable taste--such jests as we read
of in Grammont's memoirs, which generally aimed at making an ugly woman
ridiculous, or an injured husband the sport and victim of wicked lover and
heartless wife. No sense of the fitness of things constrained her ladyship
from communicating these Court scandals to her guileless sister. Did they
not comprise the only news worth anybody's attention, and relate to the
only class of people who had any tangible existence for Lady Fareham? There
were millions of human beings, no doubt, living and acting and suffering on
the surface of the earth, outside the stellary circles of which Louis and
Charles were the suns; but there was no interstellar medium of sympathy to
convey the idea of those exterior populations to Hyacinth's mind.
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