Page:Memoirs of the Lady Hester Stanhope.djvu/109

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Lady Hester Stanhope.
95

pleasant to look at. But where will you see men like Lord Rivers, like the Duke of Dorset? Where will you find such pure honour as was in the Duke of Richmond and Lord Winchelsea? The men of the present generation are good for nothing—they have no spunk in them.

"And as for women, show me such women of fashion as Lady Salisbury, the Duchess of Rutland, Lady Stafford, and" (three or four more were named, but they have slipped my memory). "However, doctor, I never knew more than four fashionable women, who could do the honours of their house, assign to everybody what was due to his rank, enter a room and speak to everybody, and preserve their dignity and self-possession at all times: it is a very difficult thing to acquire. One was the old Duchess of Rutland, the others the Marchioness of Stafford, Lady Liverpool, and the Countess of Mansfield:[1]—all the rest of the bon ton were bosh" (in Turkish, good for nothing). "The Countess of Liverpool was a Hervey; and men used to say, the world was divided into men, women, and Herveys—for that they were unlike every other human being. I have seen Lady Liverpool come into a room full of people ; and she would bow to this one,

  1. Louisa, in her own right Countess of Mansfield, is here meant.