the Tsar Nicholas I. were all delighted to do honour to a hostess so
captivating and so queenly.

At Middleton Park, her lord's Oxfordshire seat, she dispensed a
hospitality which was the despair of her rivals. Her retinue of servants
seldom numbered less than a hundred, and many a week her guests, with
their attendants, far exceeded a thousand. Money was squandered with a
prodigal hand. The very servants, it is said, drank champagne and hock
like water; her housemaids had their riding horses, and dressed in silks
and satins. Among her thousands of guests were such men as Wellington
and Peel, Castlereagh and Canning, all humble worshippers at her shrine;
and Lord Byron who, in his gloomy moods, would shut himself in his
bedroom for days, living on biscuits and water, and stealing out at dead
of night to wander ghost-like through the neighbouring woods. These
moods of black despondency he varied by turbulent spirits, when he would
be the gayest of the gay, and would challenge his fellow-guests to
drinking bouts, in which he always came off the victor.

Lady Jersey had no more ardent admirer than Byron, whose muse was
inspired to many a flight in honour of

"The grace of mien,
The eye that gladdens and the brow serene;
The glossy darkness of that clustering hair,
Which shades, yet shows that forehead more than fair."

And among her army of guests the Countess moved like a Queen, who could
stoop to frivolity without losing a shred of dignity. Surely never was
such superabundant energy enshrined in a form so beautiful and stately.

"Shall I tell you what Lady Jersey is like?" wrote
Creevey. "She is like one of her numerous gold and silver
dicky-birds that are in all the showrooms of this house.
She begins to sing at eleven o'clock, and, with the
interval of the hour when she retires to her cage to
rest, she sings till twelve at night without a moment's
interruption. She changes her feathers for dinner, and
her plumage both morning and evening is the most
beautiful I ever saw."

She seemed indeed incapable of fatigue. Tongue and body alike never
seemed to rest, from rising to going to bed.

"She is really wonderful," says Lady Granville; "and how
she can stand the life she leads is still more wonderful.
She sees everybody in her own house, and calls on
everybody in theirs. She is all over Paris, and at all
th