light as that of his little home-keeping wife, with her "wild, poetic
face," her fancy which rings always truer than Tom's own, and her
mother-love, which sorrow has to sound so deeply before she can leave
the scene. Her appearances are fitful; she keeps to the hearth when
the grandees hold the floor. You see nothing of her at Holland House,
which Tom may use as his inn, or at Bowood, if she can help herself,
which in the country is his house of call. She is the Jenny Wren of
this little cock-robin; she wears drab, too often mourning; but you
find that she counts for very much with Tom. He loves to know her at
his back, loves to remind himself of it. He is always happy to be home
again in her faithful arms. Through all the sparkle and flash, under
all the talk, through all the tinklings of pianos and guitars which
declare Tom's whereabouts, if you listen you can hear the quiet burden
of her heart-beats. I don't know what he would have done without her,
nor what we should have to say to his literary remains if she were
not in them to make them smell of lavender. Few men of letters, and no
wits, can have left more behind, with less in them.

There is a great deal less of Bessy in the memoirs than, say, of Lady
Donegal, or of Rogers, or of Lord Lansdowne, but somehow or another
she makes herself felt; and though her appearances in them are of
Tom's contrivance, a personality is more surely expressed than in most
of his more elaborate portraits. One gets to know her as indeed the
"excellent and beautiful person" of Lord John's measured approval, not
so much by what she says or does as by her reactions on Tom himself.
A study of her has to be made out of a number of pencil-scratches--one
here, one there--put down by the diarist with unpremeditated art; for
it is certain that, though Moore intended his diaries to speak for him
after his death, what he had to say of his wife was the last thing
in them he would have relied upon to do it. I am sure that is so;