After the decided refusal of Mrs. Margaret Mortimer to go to London, the family resumed their former ancestorial habits of stately regularity, and decorous grandeur, such as became a magnificent and well-ordered household, of which a noble maiden was the head and president. But this regularity was without rigour, and this monotony without apathy—the minds of these highly fated females were too familiar with trains of lofty thinking, and images of noble deeds, to sink into vacancy, or feel depression from solitude. I behold them (said the stranger) as I once saw them, seated in a vast irregularly shaped apartment, wainscotted with oak richly and quaintly carved, and as black as ebony—Mrs. Ann Mortimer, in a recess which terminated in an ancient casement window, the upper panes of which were gorgeously emblazoned with the arms of the Mortimers, and some legendary achievements of the former heroes of the family. A book she valued much57 lay on her knee, on which she fixed her eyes intently—the light that came through the casement chequering its dark lettered pages with hues of such glorious and fantastic colouring, that they resembled the leaves of some splendidly-illuminated missal, with all its pomp of gold, and azure, and vermilion.
At a little distance sat her two grandnieces, employed in work, and relieving their attention to it by conversation, for which they had ample materials. They spoke of the poor whom they had visited and assisted—of the rewards they had distributed among the industrious and orderly—and of the books which they were studying; and of which the well-filled shelves of the library furnished them with copious and noble stores.
Sir Roger had been a man of letters as well as of arms. He had been often heard to say, that next to a well-stocked armoury in time of war, was a well-stocked library in time of peace; and even in the midst of his latter grievances and privations, he contrived every year to make an addition to his own.
His granddaughters, well instructed by him in the French and Latin languages, had read Mezeray, Thuanus, and Sully. In English, they had Froissart in the black-letter translation of Pynson, imprinted 1525. Their poetry, exclusive of the classics, consisted chiefly of Waller, Donne, and that constellation of writers that illuminated the drama in the latter end of the reign of Elizabeth, and the commencement of that of James—Marlowe, and Massinger, and Shirley, and Ford—cum multis aliis. Fairfax’s translations had made them familiar with the continental poets; and Sir Roger had consented to admit, among his modern collection, the Latin poems (the only ones then published) of Milton, for the sake of that “in Quintum Novembris”—for Sir Roger, next to the fanatics, held the Catholics in utter abomination.
(“Then he will be damned to all eternity,” said Aliaga, “and that’s some satisfaction.”)
Thus their retirement was not inelegant, nor unaccompanied with those delights at once soothing and elating, which arise from a judicious mixture of useful occupation and literary tastes.
On all they read or conversed of, Mrs. Ann Mortimer was a living comment. Her conversation, rich in anecdote, and accurate to minuteness, sometimes rising to the loftiest strains of eloquence, as she related “deeds of the days of old,” and often borrowing the sublimity of inspiration, as the reminiscences of religion softened and solemnized the spirit with which she spake—like the influence of time on fine paintings, that consecrates the tints it mellows, and makes the colours it has half obscured more precious to the eye of feeling and of taste, than they were in the glow of their early beauty—her conversation was to her grandnieces at once history and poetry.
The events of English history then not recorded, had a kind of traditional history more vivid, if not so faithful as the records of modern historians, in the memories of those who had been agents and sufferers (the terms are probably synonymous) in those memorable periods.
There was an entertainment then, banished by modern dissipation now, but alluded to by the great poet of that nation, whom your orthodox and undeniable creed justly devotes to eternal damnation.
In winter’s tedious nights sit by the fire, …
… and tell the tales
Of woeful ages long ago betid; …And send the hearers weeping to their beds. …
We cited up a thousand heavy times. …
When memory thus becomes the depository of grief, how faithfully is the charge kept!—and how much superior are the touches of one who paints from the life, and the heart, and the senses—to those of one who dips his pen in his inkstand, and casts his eye on a heap of musty parchments, to glean his facts or his feelings
