The story of two noble lives, being memorials of Charlotte, countess Canning, and Louisa, marchioness of Waterford

Front matter

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Preface

Surviving friends and relations have urged a gathering up of the precious fragments from the lives of two gifted and beautiful sisters, well known and greatly beloved in their lifetime, but who have left no descendants behind them, and whose contemporaries are rapidly passing away. In their former home of Highcliffe, immense masses remain from the letters and journals of the elder sister, Charlotte,. Lady Canning, preserved as precious memorials by her mother and sister, when the hand that wrote them was still for ever. With these, have been found many letters from the group of remarkable women by whom the childhood and youth of the sisters were surrounded — sometimes of general interest and historic in themselves, and more often valuable to a narrower circle from the glimpses they give of the family life at Paris, Bure, Tyttenhanger, and HighcHffe.

Of the life of the younger sister, Louisa, Lady Waterford, the want of material makes it

PREFACE impossible to give the detailed account which might be looked for. She left scarcely any journals, and all her correspondence with her husband, and most of that with her mother and sister, has been destroyed. From scattered letters which remain, and from the recollection of those who loved her best, it has been only possible to construct a fragmentary memorial. Those who were much in the sunshine of her gracious presence need no reminder of what she was : her noble simplicity of character, her playful humour, her warm interest, her gentle sympathy, her utter forgetfulness of self, her enthusiasm for all things good and beautiful, must be ever present with them. But it has been thought that there are many outside the quiet circle in which she lived, who may care to know the little that can be told of one who might be described by Longfellow's lines —

" Homeward serenely she walked, with God's benediction upon her : When she had passed, it seemed like the ceasing of exquisite music."

AUGUSTUS J. C. HARE.

Holmhurst, 1893.