Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 3).djvu/413

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THE MARQUIS OF DUFFERIN AND AVA.
415

and feeling, which include the well-known ballads of The Irish Emigrant," "Terence's Farewell," and "Katy's Letter." It is generally said that it was to this distinguished woman, by whose friendship he was honoured, that the poet Moore addressed the following lines:—

"Beauty may boast of her eyes and her cheeks,
But Love from the lip his true archery wings;
And she who but feathers the shaft when she speaks,
At once sends it home to the heart when she sings."


Helen, Lady Dufferin.
From a Drawing.

Another very charming and gracefully satirical production from the pen of Helen, Lady Dufferin, is entitled, in playful parody of her son's Icelandic tour, "Lispings from Low Latitudes," and relates the adventures of an English lady in Egypt. The numerous illustrations, which are very spirited and full of humour, place the heroine in every situation that drollery and imagination can suggest, and are from the same gifted hand. We are able to give a portrait of Lady Dufferin taken in the latter part of her life. The remaining two of the brilliant trio of sisters, without mention of whom no published annals of Court and social life during the first half of this century seem complete, were the Duchess of Somerset, who was unanimously elected Queen of Beauty in the celebrated Eglinton Tournament in 1839, and Mrs. Norton, a writer of romance eminent in her day, some of whose songs and verses are almost as popular now as during her lifetime, and whose story of "The Lady of La Garaye," told in verse, has rarely found its equal in simple charm and pathos in any language.

The present Marchioness of Dufferin, whose family is mentioned elsewhere, is known to all for the great work she undertook in India with view to ameliorating the condition of the native women, and introducing female medical aid into the zenanas. Only those acquainted through personal experience with the ignorance of the most common laws of nature, and the apathy shown in the presence of the most terrible and most protracted of sufferings, can have any idea of the condition of things in this respect in our Eastern empire before the noble hearted Vicereine took the matter in hand. Of the tact and assiduity with which she induced one great Indian prince after another to permit, to sympathise with, and to aid in undertaking, till the whole vast peninsula was working with her and for her, this is not the place to speak, more especially as an article on "Lady Dufferin and the Women of India" appeared in this magazine last November. Nor yet can more than one brief word be said of the grace and dignity with which, since she took her place by his side as a bride of eighteen, Lady Dufferin has accompanied her husband from place to place, making his many difficult tasks light in a manner which only a woman can, and adding to his popularity by the exercise of her own unquestioned charms, which have secured for her the respect and admiration of all who have known her on both sides the world.

Helen, Lady Dufferin, was her son's guardian until he came of age, but before that time he began to put his house in order by planting long avenues of trees in all directions round Clandeboye, his place