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An old friend must not turn her back on account of a folly, distasteful as it might be to her to be reminded of such matters. My lord, I think, read his daughter very well, and, being determined to afford me an opportunity to make my peace, engaged Lord Carford in conversation, and bade her lead me into the room behind to see the picture that Lely had lately painted of her.
The countenance was singularly beautiful, and of a character of beauty eminently patrician; there was in its expression a gentleness and modesty not often found in the female portraits of Sir Peter Lely, and in the eyes and in the smile a wonderful aspect of innocent happiness.
"A handsome woman, that," he said, after one of these moments of inattention, "and a good picture." "It is an ancestress of ours on the distaff side, Lady Philippa Vane, and is accounted a Lely. Brother Gregory, if you will have the kindness to cut the cards we can proceed with our game.
Near the window thus emblazoned hung a portrait, by Sir Peter Lely, of one of the Lucy family, a great beauty of the time of Charles the Second: the old housekeeper shook her head as she pointed to the picture, and informed me that this lady had been sadly addicted to cards, and had gambled away a great portion of the family estate, among which was that part of the park where Shakespeare and his comrades had killed the deer.
So the servant ushered us through a hall, where were many family pictures by Lely, and, for aught I know, by Vandyke, and by Kneller, and other famous painters, up a grand staircase, and into the library, the inner room of which contained the ponderous volumes which John Evelyn used to read.
But it is to the brush of Sir Peter Lely that we owe that exquisite portrait of Sue, when she was Countess of Northallerton, the friend of Queen Catherine, the acknowledged beauty at the Court of the Restoration.
Raphael has made infantile grace obvious to unmaternal eyes; Turner opened to many a preoccupied vision the wonders of atmosphere; Constable guided our perception of the casual phenomena of wind; Landseer, that of the natural language of the brute creation; Lely, of the coiffure; Michel Angelo, of physical grandeur; Rolfe, of fish; Gerard Dow, of water; Cuyp, of meadows; Cooper, of cattle; Stanfield, of the sea; and so on through every department of pictorial art.
This occupation of Maulevrier Castle had continued to the present time, and was likely still to continue, Maulevrier having no desire to set up housekeeping in a feudal castle in the marches. 'How came you to know Maulevrier Castle? repeated Mary. 'I was there once. There is a picture by Lely, a portrait of a Lady Maulevrier in Charles the Second's time. The face is yours, my love.
"You have described her well. The features of Diana! It was at a revival of Vanbrugh's 'Relapse' I first met her, dressed after the fashion of the Countess of Ossory. Who would not worship before the figures of Lely?" He half closed his eyes, as though gazing in fancy upon the glossy draperies and rosy flesh of those voluptuous court beauties.
Soon after their return Mr. Godwin set to work painting the head of a Sybil, which the Lord of Hatfield House had commanded, on the recommendation of Sir Peter Lely, taking Anne Fitch for his model, and she sitting in that room of the Court house he had prepared for his workshop.
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