yet larger mercantile speculations with a trading firm in Waterford also failed. Impending ruin infuriated his natural irascibility until he came at last to be a terror to his wife and children. Arrayed like a dandy of the period in buckskins and top-boots, he flaunted about then so constantly in lace ruffles and white cravat, that he was habitually spoken of among the Tipperary bloods as ‘Shiver-the-Frills’ or ‘Beau Power.’
In 1804 Marguerite, being then a child of fourteen and a half, was proposed for by two officers of the 47th regiment, then stationed at Clonmel. Her parents forced her to marry one of these, Captain Maurice St. Leger Farmer of Poplar Hall and Laurel Grove, co. Kildare, a man who indulged in such ungovernable outbursts of passion as to suggest insanity. Three months after their marriage, on 7 March 1804, upon Captain Farmer being ordered to join his regiment, then encamped on the Curragh of Kildare, Marguerite resolutely refused to accompany him, and returned to her father's house at Clonmel. In 1807 she was at Cahir, and in 1809 at Dublin, and at eighteen her beauty had become so conspicuous that her portrait was painted by Sir Thomas Lawrence. In 1816 she was in Manchester Square, London. There she was still residing when, on 21 Oct. 1817, Captain Farmer was killed during a drunken orgie by falling from a window in the King's Bench prison. Four months afterwards his widow, on 16 Feb. 1818, was married at the church in Bryanston Square to Charles John Gardiner, second Viscount Mountjoy, and first Earl of Blessington. Seven years her senior and a widower, this nobleman drew from his estates in Ireland an annual income of thirty thousand pounds. This fortune he squandered on every whim. Upon his first wife's funeral four years earlier he had expended 3,000l. Upon his new bride he lavished every luxury. Their town mansion, 11 St. James's Square, was fitted up like the palace of a Sybarite. Under the influence of Lady Blessington it soon became a centre of social attraction. Early in 1822 she published anonymously her first work, ‘The Magic Lantern, or Sketches of Scenes in the Metropolis,’ 16mo. In 1822 she also published ‘Sketches and Fragments,’ 12mo. On 22 Aug. 1822 Lord and Lady Blessington started upon a continental tour. They were attended by the youngest sister of the countess, Mary Anne Power, afterwards, in 1832, married to the Baron de St. Marsault; by a young architect, who became famous as Charles Mathews the light comedian, and by Alfred Count d'Orsay, proverbially the handsomest man of his time, and a very Crichton in his accomplishments. With him the Countess of Blessington, down to the close of her life, was thenceforth most intimately associated.
At Genoa in 1823, for two months together, from 1 April to 1 June, the Blessingtons were in daily intercourse with Lord Byron. Before Byron parted from the Blessingtons, his acquaintance with whom had so rapidly ripened into intimate friendship that he did so with a passion of tears, he had sold his yacht Bolivar to the earl, and had written not only a jeu d'esprit, but one of the last of his minor poems to the countess.
Early in Lord Blessington's Italian tour his only legitimate son by his first wife, Luke, Viscount Mountjoy, died in his tenth year. Some time before its close the earl's only legitimate daughter, Lady Harriet Gardiner, then a girl of fifteen, was married on 1 Dec. 1827, at Naples, to Count d'Orsay. Towards the end of 1828 the whole party moved homewards, and on arriving in Paris took up their residence in the Hôtel Maréchal-Ney. There, on 23 May 1829, the Earl of Blessington died from a stroke of apoplexy at the age of forty-six. The earl's estate had diminished from 30,000l. to 23,000l. a year. Upon his death all his honours became extinct. The countess remained in Paris during the revolution of 1830. Towards the close of 1831 she took a house in Seamore Place, Mayfair, where she resumed her old social pre-eminence. She in some measure, however, shared the honours of fashionable supremacy with the Countess of Charleville, Lady Holland, and for a while with the Dowager Countess of Cork, down to the latter's death in 1840 at the age of ninety-four. ‘Everybody goes to Lady Blessington,’ writes Haydon in his ‘Diary’ at this period (iii. 12). N. P. Willis, shortly after this, on calling in upon her at Seamore Place, speaks of her, in his ‘Pencillings by the Way’ (p. 356), as ‘one of the most lovely and fascinating women I have ever seen,’ and of Count d'Orsay (p. 355) as ‘the most splendid specimen of a man, and a well-dressed one,’ he had ever beheld. Lady Blessington's income after the earl's death was restricted to her jointure of 2,000l. a year. Besides living expensively she had dependent upon her seven or eight members of her own family. To maintain her position she took to authorship. In 1833 appeared her first novel in 3 vols., ‘Grace Cassidy, or the Repealers.’ She then also began writing industriously for the periodicals, for annuals and magazines. Her house in Seamore Place, in the summer of 1833, was broken into and robbed of plate and jewellery to the value of 1,000l. In 1834 she began her many years' editorship of the ‘Book of Beauty,’ to which she was herself the most industrious
