No woman was more generous to those needing help, more modest over her beneficent works, nor has any woman’s weak point been more fostered by Fate than that of Lady Blessington. While the Earl lived, luxury and extravagance were showered upon her in every possible form. After his death she was under the influence of the Comte D’Orsay, a past master in the art of spending money. London went mad over the shape of a tie, if that shape was introduced by Comte D’Orsay. He was a man of genius, a talented painter and sculptor, a brilliant conversationalist, of the most prepossessing appearance. Generous to the many refugees of his country in London, extravagant in personal matters, he was in constant debt. He possessed faultless taste, and was the best horseman, fencer, and shot in Society. The two were undoubtedly the most often quoted and best-known figures of social life and the Park in the early nineteenth century. They lived at the rate of thousands a year, and seldom had a penny. Lady Blessington struggled to pay D’Orsay’s debts and her own, and to keep things going; but at length she could struggle no longer. Gore House was seized by the creditors, and its contents sold. In April 1849 the couple fled to Paris, where within two months Lady Blessington died in great poverty. Lady Blessington was one of the first women to take up literature, and she was most handsomely paid for her work; so well, indeed, that at times she was in affluence, and at others plunged into the verge of bankruptcy. It was a strange coincidence that Lady Blessington’s first work described the ruin and selling up of a large establishment. Her whole life was one long romance, as pathetic and lonely at times as it was brilliant and splendid at others. A great innovation during the Waterloo period was the Achilles Statue, of which much was written, the pen of Bernal Osborne and many others finding in it food for satire. It was the first nude statue erected in England, and shocked Society—none the less, to be sure, because it was the tribute of the ladies of England to the heroic Wellington. The subscribers protested that they were not consulted by Westmacott, the sculptor. An eccentric old Sheriff, who disported himself in Hyde Park, especially expressed himself on the subject. People turned their backs and fled to Rotten Row again.