and the Regency; but I know a lady who
has a teapot which belonged, she says, to Madame Du Barry." Madame
Novikoff, however, records his discomfiture at the query of a
certain Lady E-, who, when all London was ringing with his first
Crimean volumes, asked him if he were not an admirer of Louis
Napoleon. "Le pauvre Kinglake, decontenance, repondit tout bas
intimide comme un enfant qu'on met dates le coin: Oui--non--pas
precisement."
He had no knowledge of or liking for music. Present once by some
mischance at a matinee musicale, he was asked by the hostess what
kind of music he preferred. His preference, he owned, was for the
drum. One thinks of the "Bourgeois Gentilhomme," "la trompette
marine est un instrument qui me plait, el qui est harmonieux"; we
are reminded, too, of Dean Stanley, who, absolutely tone-deaf, and
hurrying away whenever music was performed, once from an adjoining
room in his father's house heard Jenny Lind sing "I know that my
Redeemer liveth." He went to her shyly, and told her that she had
given him an idea of what people mean by music. Once before, he
said in all seriousness, the same feeling had come over him, when
before the palace at Vienna he had heard a tattoo rendered by four
hundred drummers.
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