lantry; where women were none the worse thought of if they added
to the official _cavaliere servente_ a whole string of other lovers,
varying from the Cardinals of the Holy Church to the singers who
played women's parts, in powder and hoops, at the opera; in this world
of jog-trot immorality, where jealousy was tolerated in lovers, but
ridiculous in husbands, such a couple as the Count and Countess of
Albany was indeed a source of pity, wonder, and amazement. But if a
husband who barricaded his wife's room, never went out without her, nor
permitted her to go out without him, who was never further off than the
next room during the presence of any visitor, was a marvellous sight;
still more marvellous was a beautiful and charming woman of twenty-three
or twenty-four, who cast no glances of longing at the brilliant
cavaliers all round her, who consoled her dreary prison-hours with
reading hard enough for a professor at the university, and who showed
towards the peevish, violent, disgustingly-ailing old toper who
overshadowed her life with his presence nothing, as Horace Mann tells
us, but attention and tenderness. The fact is that Louise of Stolberg,
much as her subsequent life and ways of thought proved her to be a woman
of the eighteenth century, and not at all above the eighteenth century's
easy-going habits and conventional ideas, was a kind of woman rare at
all times and rarest of all in a time like her own, With a kindly and
affectionate temper, the immense bulk of her nature, the overbalance, the
top-heaviness of it, was intellectual; and intellectual not in the sense
of the ready society intelligence, so common among eighteenth-century
women, but in the sense of actual engrossing interest and in abstract
questions and ideals. The portraits done of her immediately after her
marriage show, as I have said, a remarkably childish person; and
childish, without much ballast of passion or even likings, the likeness
sketched by Bonstetten seems certainly to show her. But there are women
who, while immature as women and human beings, are precocious as
intellects, and in whom the character, instead of rapidly developing
itself by the force of its own emotions and passions, seems in a manner
to be called into existence by the intelligence: retarded natures, in
whom the thoughts seem to determine the feelings. Of this sort, I think,
we must imagine the Countess of Albany, if we would understand the
anomalies of her life: a person