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I find her very earliest poetical work, "The Sylphid Queen," thus spoken of in a letter from the second Mrs. Sheridan to her mother, Mrs. Lefanu "I should have acknowledged your very welcome present immediately, had not Mr. Sheridan, on my telling him what it was, run off with it, and I have been in vain endeavoring to get it from him ever since. Frances Sheridan.
When I was a boy, an elderly friend of mine, Miss Lefanu, narrated to me an anecdote which impressed me much. It was to this effect. Miss Lefanu was walking one day along a very lonely country lane, when she suddenly observed an enormous Newfoundland dog following in her wake a few yards behind. Being very fond of dogs, she called out to it in a caressing voice and endeavoured to stroke it.
"How d'ye do?" she repeated "I'm Joanna." Miss Bunce rose, and going discreetly to the window, pretended to gaze into the street. As for the Misses Lefanu, being unused to rise without help, they spread out their hands as if stretching octaves on the edge of the table, and feebly stared. "Joanna," began the elder, tremulously, "if you have come to ask charity " "Bless your heart, no!
He is also to continue their physician. He has now L500 a year, independent of his practice. I don't myself see the thing quite in the light they do; but they think him a man of such great abilities, such great worth and honour, that I am the most fortunate person in the world. To her old friend, Mrs. Lefanu, she writes in much the same strain.
Père Lefanu had been ordained a Secular Priest before he had become a Regular Monk, and, he told me that if I had any Conscientious Scruples as to the Husband being a Protestant and the Wife of another way of Thinking, I could have the marriage done over again in whatever way I thought proper on our return to Europe.
Then Jinny Carslake, after her affair with Lefanu the American painter, frequented Indian philosophers, and now you find her in pensions in Italy cherishing a little jeweller's box containing ordinary pebbles picked off the road.
The letters are addressed to Mrs. H. Lefanu, the second sister of Mr. Sheridan. "Bristol, June 1, 1792. "I am happy to have it in my power to give you any information on a subject so interesting to you, and to all that have the happiness of knowing dear Mrs. Sheridan; though I am sorry to add, it cannot be such as will relieve your anxiety, or abate your fears.
At ten she puts them to bed. Afterwards, "the good Bunce " who is fifty, looks like a grenadier, and wears a large mole on her chin takes up a French novel, fastened by a piece of elastic between the covers of Baxter's "Saint's Rest," and reads for an hour before retiring. Her pay is fifty-two pounds a year, and her attachment to the Misses Lefanu a matter of inference rather than perception.
Miss Lefanu never visited the spot alone after dusk, and had been warned against it even in the daytime. As she drew near to it, everything that she had ever heard about it flashed across her mind, and she was more than once on the verge of turning back, when the sight of the big, friendly-looking dog plodding behind, reassuring her, she pressed on.
So Père Lefanu came privately, to avoid Gossip, to the Physician's House, and Lilias Lovell and John Dangerous were made One in the French Language, the contracting parties being English, the Bridegroom's best man a tawny Mahometan Moor, and the only Bridesmaid a Black Negress. Seized with a Malignant Distemper, and after but three days' Sickness, the good Hamet Abdoollah died.
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