When a widow of twenty-nine she married the Earl of Blessington. From comparative penury, she was raised at one step into the most luxurious and fashionable life of the time. Her equipage was considered one of the most elegant in the Park, where she drove regularly until she went abroad with her husband. Lord Blessington was a man of great wealth; but even his resources were taxed to meet the excessive extravagance of his wife. After his death in 1829 her reign in the social life of London really began. Possessed at that time of a large fortune, she filled the house in Seamore Place with valuable furniture and _objets d’art_, and to her brilliant salon flocked all the wit and genius of the day. The Duke of Wellington, Bulwer Lytton, the two Disraelis, Lord Brougham, Sir Thomas Lawrence, Thomas Moore, Sir E. Landseer, Landor, Maclise, Ainsworth, Thackeray, and Lord John Russell were often to be found there. A contemporary has left a graceful pen picture of her. “In a long library, lined alternately with splendidly bound books and mirrors, and with a deep window of the breadth of the room, opening upon Hyde Park, I found Lady Blessington alone. The picture to my eye as the door opened was a very lovely one; a woman of remarkable beauty half buried in a _fauteuil_ of yellow satin, reading by a magnificent lamp suspended from the centre of the arched ceiling, ... and a delicate white hand relieved on the back of a book, to which the eye was attracted by the blaze of its diamond rings.” Later Lady Blessington moved to Gore House, Kensington, where the great philanthropist, William Wilberforce, had preceded her. It stood on the site of the Albert Hall. Her entertainments were on a more lavish scale in this larger house, and troubles gathered round her. Of Count D’Orsay’s relations with Lady Blessington much was said at the time. Married, by previous agreement with Lord Blessington, to his daughter—a mere child, and the stepdaughter of the Countess—he found his kindred spirit was really the child-wife’s stepmother. [Illustration: LADY BLESSINGTON.]