The Nortons' house was close to the issue from St. James's Park into
Great George Street. I remember passing an evening with them there, when
a host of distinguished public and literary men were crowded into their
small drawing-room, which was literally resplendent with the light of
Sheridan beauty, male and female: Mrs. Sheridan (Miss Callender, of
whom, when she published a novel, the hero of which commits forgery,
that wicked wit, Sidney Smith, said he knew she was a Callender, but did
not know till then that she was a Newgate calendar), the mother of the
Graces, more beautiful than anybody but her daughters; Lady Grahame,
their beautiful aunt; Mrs. Norton, Mrs. Blackwood (Lady Dufferin),
Georgiana Sheridan (Duchess of Somerset and queen of beauty by universal
consent), and Charles Sheridan, their younger brother, a sort of younger
brother of the Apollo Belvedere. Certainly I never saw such a bunch of
beautiful creatures all growing on one stem. I remarked it to Mrs.
Norton, who looked complacently round her tiny drawing-room and said,
"Yes, we are rather good-looking people." I remember this evening
because of the impression made on me by the sight of these wonderfully
"good-looking people" all together, and also because of my having had to
sing with Moore--an honor and glory hardly compensating the distress of
semi-strangulation, in order to avoid drowning his feeble thread of a
voice with the heavy, robust contralto which I found it very difficult
to swallow half of, while singing second to him, in his own melodies,
with the other half. My acquaintance with Mrs. Norton lasted through a
period of many years, and, though never very intimate, was renewed with
cordiality each time I returned to England. It began just after I came
out on the stage, when I was about twenty, and she a few years older. My
father and mother had known her parents and grandparents, Richard
Brinsley Sheridan and Miss Lindley, from whom their descendants derived
the remarkable beauty and brilliant wit which distinguished them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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