found a small mine of welcome gold. Her "Books of Beauty" and "Gems of
Beauty" were an instantaneous success--they made a strong appeal to the
flowery sentiment of the time, and sold in tens of thousands of copies.
Her "Conversations with Byron," a record of those halcyon days at Genoa,
fed the curiosity which then invested the most romantic of poets with a
glamour which survives to our day; and her novels and gossipy books of
travel were hailed in succession by an eager public of readers.

In these years of prolific literary labour she was able to double her
jointure, and to maintain much of the splendour to which she had become
so accustomed. Even her literary children were cradled in luxury on a
_fauteuil_ of yellow satin, in a library crowded with sumptuous couches
and ottomans, enamel tables and statutary. To her house in Seamore Place
her beauty and fame drew the most eminent men in England, from Lawrence
and Lyndhurst to Lytton and young Disraeli, gorgeous as his hostess, in
gold-flowered waistcoat, gold rings and chains, white stick with black
tassel, and his shower of ringlets.

But the Seamore Place house proved too cabined and too modest for my
lady's exacting social ambition. She demanded a more spacious and
magnificent shrine for her beauty, which was still so remarkable that
she was considered the loveliest woman at the Court of George III. when
well advanced in the forties--and this she found at Gore House, in
Kensington, a stately mansion in which Wilberforce had made his home,
and which, surrounded by beautiful gardens and shut in with a girdle of
spreading trees, might have been in the heart of the country, instead of
within sight of the tide of fashion which flowed in Hyde Park.

Here for thirteen years, with the handsome, gay, accomplished d'Orsay,
who had separated from his wife, as major-domo, she dispensed a princely