Part 40 (2/2)
Most of Lady Burton's reratitude to God, tender and Christian senti [686]
”I did see The Tilad of it Kinder still is The Sunday Sun, the 1st, the 8th and the 15th of October, five columns each, which say that I have completely lifted any cloud away from his memory, and that his future faes Thank God!” St George Burton icked enough to twit her for her spelling, and to say that he found out as many as seventeen words incorrectly spelt in one letter But she deftly excused herself by saying that she used archaic forood-hu” She did not excuse her slang by calling it old, or refer her friends to Chaucer for ”awfully glad”
The greatest pleasure of her life was now, as she oddly expresses it, to ”dress thedick's anniversary” She says (21st October 1893 to Mrs E J Burton), [687] ”I received your dear flowers, and the hts and flowers sent by relations and affectionate friends Yours stood in front of the altar”
Then follows a delicious and very characteristic salish: ”We had mass and communion,” she says, ”and crowds of friends caraphers”
She was glad to visit and decorate the Mortlake tomb certainly, but the pleasure was a very ht frohts:
”O tomb, O tomb, thou art neither earth nor heaven unto me” [688]
When Lady Stisted died (27th December 1893), Lady Burton felt the blow keenly, and she wrote very feelingly on the subject, ”Yes,” she says, in a letter to Mrs E J Burton, ”I was very shocked at poor Maria's death, andhad coe Burton, ”You would be surprised to know, and I am surprised myself, how much I feel it” In a letter to Madame de Gutmansthal-Benvenuti (10th January 1894), Lady Burton refers to the Burton tableau to Madame Tussaud's She says, ”They have now put Richard in the Meccan dress he wore in the desert They have given hie space with sand, water, palht, painted yellow, throws a lurid light on the scene It is quite life-like I gave them the real clothes and the real weapons, and dressed hilad,” she writes to Miss Stisted, [689] ”you went to Tussaud's, and that you adroup I aht when it stands up properly, but I have always had a trouble with Tussaud about a certain stoop which he declares is artistic, and which I say was not natural to hihts 1894
Lady Burton now authorised the publication of what is called the Library Edition of The Arabian Nights According to the Editorial Note, while in Lady Burton's Edition no fewer than 215 pages of the original are wanting [690] in this edition the excisions aoes on: ”These few oe which Sir Richard gave to his subscribers that no cheaper edition of the entire work should be issued; but in all other respects the original text has been reproduced with scrupulous fidelity”
By this time Lady Burton had lost two of her Trieste friends, namely Lisa, the baroness-maid who died in 1891, and Mrs Victoria Maylor, Burton's amanuensis, who died in 1894
Chapter XLI Death of Lady Burton
Bibliography:
87 The Jew, the Gypsy, and El Islas in Three Continents 1901
183 Lady Burton at Eastbourne
Lady Burton spent the year 1894 and part of 1895 at Baker Street and Mortlake,occasional visits to friends As at Trieste, she surrounded herself with a crowd of servants and other idle people whoood nature, she systematically pampered, and who in their turn did their best to make her life unendurable She could, however, easily afford these luxuries, for thanks to the large sums received for her Life of Sir Richard, the Library Edition, &c, she was now in affluent circumstances She won to herself and certainly deserved the character of ”a dear old lady” In politics she was a ”progressive Conservative,”
though what that meant neither she nor those about her had any clear notion She dearly loved children--at a safe distance--and gave treats, by proxy, to all the Catholic schools in the neighbourhood She took an active interest in various charities, became an anti-vivisectionist, and used very humanely to beat people about the head with her u animals If they remonstrated, she used to retort, ”Yes, and how do you like It?” ”When she wanted a cab,” says Mr
W H Wilkins, ”she invariably inspected the horse carefully first, to see if it looked well fed and cared for; if not, she discharged the cab and got another; and she would always impress upon the driver that he must not beat his horse under any consideration” On one occasion she sadly forgot herself She and her sister, Mrs FitzGerald, had hired a cab at Charing Cross Station and were in a great hurry to get home Of course, as usual, she impressed upon the cabman that he was not to beat his horse ”The horse, which was a wretched old screw, refused, in consequence, to go atwith iot herself as to put her head out of theand cry to the driver, ”Why don't you beat hio?” [691] She occasionally met her husband's friends, Mr and Mrs Arbuthnot and Mr Payne One day at some dinner it transpired in the course of conversation that Mr Payne had all his life been an habitual sufferer from insomnia