The Highland Lady In Ireland. Elizabeth Grant

must live in publick. Great and good and noble qualities she has, her motives are pure, her actions benevolent and disinterested, her activity in well doing unwearied, but the world must know of it all and praise it all. Any woman of quiet delicacy, making a second marriage at forty years of age would have managed the business much more privately. There are hundreds of excellent women in these good days who do their duty more thoroughly than Jane and quite unobstrusively, but she is a fine warm-hearted creature, though a little spoiled by the doses of praise she loves.

      13. In the Inverness paper was a much more interesting paragraph to me than the bonfire, an advertisement from a tailor in Kingussie for nine journeymen ensured constant work at Inverness prices. Thirteen years ago I don’t know that there was even one tailor in the wretched looking row of houses called by courtesy a village. The first shop for soft goods had just been established, an untidy looking store where we all made a duty of buying some tea, ribbons and calico occasionally, the sale of the Duke of Gordon’s large Badenoch property has effected this improvement, it has been sold in small divisions and has created a country neighbourhood; food for reflexion in this.

      Hal a fine hunt with the harriers. All the rest went to call at Tulfarris and the good Miss Henrys had brought presents all the way from Wiesbaden for the children, parasols for the little girls and a toy for Jack, so kind in them to encumber themselves thus from such a distance, indeed to remember them at all, and it makes me take shame to myself for being so indifferent to the really kind friends amongst whom my husband has fixed. They all want much to make them really sociable neighbours, and the happiness of our circle would be materially improved could they all throw off a stiffness unknown to Highlanders and Indians, but elderly people don’t alter their habits easily, we must only make the best of it.

1. The Memoirs of Sir Samuel Romilly (1757–1818), the radical reformer; the H.L. writes a little later that he ‘just mentions my father as among the clever men at the Scotch Bar whose politicks were in the way of their advancement.’

2. One of the coarsest varieties of Irish potato.

3. Daniel Murray, who the H.L. much admired, was R.C. Archbishop of Dublin from 1823 to 1852.

4. Richard Whateley was Protestant Archbishop of Dublin from 1831–63.

5. He owned property in both counties and thus qualified for two votes.

6. Founded in 1823, the Dublin Evening Mail was a militantly Protestant newspaper.

7. I Kings, Ch.s 18 and 19.

8. Oliver Macdonagh (NH of I) describes the Lord Lieutenant as ‘a right wing Tory with Irish Protestant connections’ and the Chief Secretary as ‘a well-meaning liberal Tory’.

9. He had in fact been Lord Chancellor in 1835 and was to hold this office again from 1841 to 1846.

10. A narcotic drug prepared from the thorn apple (daturn stramonium).

11. One of Charles Lever’s early novels; the D.U.M. was seen as a strongly Tory, ascendency protestant publication.