Here, however, you would meet Tom Moore, the two Bulwers, Campbell, Talfourd, James and Horace Smith, Landseer, Theodore Hook, Disraeli the elder and the younger, Rogers, Washington Irving, N. P. Willis, Marryat, Macready, Charles Dickens, Albert Smith, Forster, Walter Savage Landor, and, in short, nearly every one who had made a reputation, or was likely to make it. Hither came also Prince Louis Napoleon, in whose fortunate star Count d’Orsay always firmly believed. The conversation was lively, and the evenings were prolonged. As for ladies, there were few ladies who went to Gore House. Doubtless they had their reasons. The outer circle, so to speak, consisted of such men as Lord Abinger, Lord Durham, Lord Strangford, Lord Porchester, Lord Nugent, writers and poetasters who contributed their illustrious names and their beautiful productions to Lady Blessington’s ‘Keepsakes.’ Thackeray was one of the ‘intimates’ at Gore House, and when the crash came in 1849, and the place was sold up by the creditors, it is on record that the author of ‘Vanity Fair’ was the only person who showed emotion. ‘Mr. Thackeray also came,’ wrote the Countess’s valet to his mistress, who had taken refuge in Paris, ‘and he went away with tears in his eyes; he is perhaps the only person I have seen really affected at your departure.’ In 1837 he was twenty-six years of age, but he had still to wait for twelve years before he was to take his real place in literature, and even then and until the day of his death there were many who could not understand his greatness. As regards Lady Blessington, her morals may have been deplorable, but there must have been something singularly attractive about her manners and conversation. It is not by a stupid or an unattractive woman that such success as hers was attained. Her novels, so far as I have been able to read them, show no remarkable ability, and her portrait shows amiability rather than cleverness; yet she must have been both clever and amiable to get so many clever men around her and to fix them, to make them come again, come often, and regard her drawing-room and her society as altogether charming, and to write such verses upon her as the following:-- Mild Wilberforce, by all beloved, Once owned this hallowed spot, Whose zealous eloquence improved The fettered Negro’s lot, Yet here still slavery attacks Whom Blessington invites; The chains from which he freed the blacks She rivets on the whites. The following lines are in another strain, more artificial, with a false ring, and curiously unlike any style of the present day. They are by N. P. Willis, who, in his ‘Pencillings,’ describes an evening at Gore House:--