Page:A Biographical Dictionary of the Celebrated Women of Every Age and Country (1804).djvu/668

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
654
BIOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY

This added to several other tender, humane, and disinterestedly generous actions, together with a distinguished taste in the elegance of dress, conversation, and manners served as a veil to cover her failings. It does not appear she had any love affair, except with the two gentlemen above-mentioned, towards whom she is said to have behaved with all the fidelity, duty and affection of a good wife. She was the darling of the town as long as she lived; and after her death, which happened 1730, her corpse was conveyed to the Jerusalem Chamber, to lie in state, and from thence to Westminster Abbey, the pall being supported by the lord De la Warr, lord Hervey, the right hon. George Bubb Doddington, Charles Hedges, Esq; Walter Carey, Esq; and capt. Elliot; her eldest son, Arthur Maynwaring, Esq; being chief mourner. She was interred toward the west end of the south isle, between the monuments of Mr. Craggs and Mr. Congreve, being elegantly dressed in her coffin, with a very fine Brussels laced head, a holland shift, with a tucker and double ruffles of the same lace, a pair of new kid gloves, and her body wrapt up in a winding sheet. She left the bulk of her substance to Arthur Maynwaring, Esq; from whose father she had received it, yet did not neglect a proper regard to her other son Charles Churchill, and her own relations.

In her person she was of a stature just rising to that height where the graceful can only begin to shew itself; of a lively aspect, and commanding mein. Nature had given her this peculiar happiness, that she looked and maintained the agreeable at a time of life, when other fine women only raise admirers by their understanding. The qualities she had acquired were the genteel and the elegant; the one in her air, and the other in her dress. The Tatler, speaking of her, says, 'Whatever

character