Scheffer and other famous artists begged for the honor of painting her
portrait. Was it strange after all this, and being told for half a century
that she was an extraordinarily gifted and fascinating woman, that (being
a woman) she should believe it?

She was extremely sensitive in regard to her age, and if forced to state
it on the witness-stand would doubtless have whispered it to the judge in
a bewitching way, as did a pretty but slightly _passe_ French actress
under similar embarrassing circumstances. She pleads: "What has a woman to
do with dates--cold, false, erroneous, chronological dates--new style, old
style, precession of the equinox, ill-timed calculation of comets long
since due at their station and never come? Her poetical idiosyncrasy,
calculated by epochs, would make the most natural points of reference in
woman's autobiography. Plutarch sets the example of dropping dates in
favor of incidents; and an authority more appropriate, Madame de Genlis,
who began her own memoirs at eighty, swept through nearly an age of
incident and revolution without any reference to vulgar eras signifying
nothing (the times themselves out of joint), testifying to the pleasant
incidents she recounts and the changes she witnessed. _I_ mean to have
none of them!"

Sydney Owenson was born in "ancient ould Dublin" at Christmas: the year is
a little uncertain. The encyclopaedias say about 1780: 1776 has been
suggested as more correct, but we will not pry into so delicate a matter.
A charming woman never loses her youth. Doctor Holmes tells us that in
travelling over the isthmus of life we do not ride in a private carriage,
but in an omnibus--meaning that our ancestors or their traits take the
trip with us; and in studying a character it is interesting to note the
combinations that from generations back make up the individual. Sydney's
father was the child of an ill-assorted marriage. "At a hurling-match long
ago the Queen of Beauty, Sydney, granddaughter of Sir Maltby Crofton, lost
her heart, like Rosalind, to the victor of the day, Walter McOwen
(anglicized Owenson), a young farmer, tall and handsome, graceful and
daring, and allowed him to discover that he had 'wrestled well and
overthrown more than his enemies.' Result, an elopement and mesalliance
never to be forgiven--the husband a jolly, racketing Irish lad, unable to
appreciate his high-toned, accomplished wife, a skilful performer on the
Irish harp, a poetess and a genius,