She, too, lived to a great
age; a slight, neat figure in dainty dress, full of antique charm
and grace. As a girl she had known Lady Hester Stanhope, who lived
with her grandmother, Lady Chatham, at Burton Pynsent, her own
father, Dr. Thomas Woodforde, being Lady Chatham's medical
attendant. {2} The future prophetess of the Lebanon was then a
wild girl, scouring the countryside on bare-backed horses; she
showed great kindness to Mary Woodforde, afterwards Kinglake's
mother. It was as his mother's son that she received him long
afterwards at Djoun. To his mother Kinglake was passionately
attached; owed to her, as he tells us in "Eothen," his home in the
saddle and his love for Homer. A tradition is preserved in the
family that on the day of her funeral, at a churchyard five miles
away, he was missed from the household group reassembled in the
mourning home; he was found to have ordered his horse, and galloped
back in the darkness to his mother's grave. Forty years later he
writes to Alexander Knox: "The death of a mother has an almost
magical power of recalling the home of one's childhood, and the
almost separate world that rests upon affection.
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