All this "crowded sumptuousness" was due to the taste of Lady
Blessington. Amid it she received royal dukes, statesmen such as
Palmerston, Canning, Castlereagh, Russell, and Brougham, actors
such as Kemble and Matthews, artists such as Lawrence and Wilkie,
and men of letters such as Moore, Bulwer-Lytton, and the two
Disraelis. To maintain this sort of life Lord Blessington raised
large amounts of money, totaling about half a million pounds
sterling, by mortgaging his different estates and giving his
promissory notes to money-lenders. Of course, he did not spend
this vast sum immediately. He might have lived in comparative
luxury upon his income; but he was a restless, eager, improvident
nobleman, and his extravagances were prompted by the urgings of
his wife.

In all this display, which Lady Blessington both stimulated and
shared, there is to be found a psychological basis. She was now
verging upon the thirties--a time which is a very critical period
in a woman's emotional life, if she has not already given herself
over to love and been loved in return. During Lady Blessington's
earlier years she had suffered in many ways, and it is probable
that no thought of love had entered her mind. She was only too
glad if she could escape from the harshness of her father and the
cruelty of her first husband. Then came her development into a
beautiful woman, content for the time to be languorously stagnant
and to enjoy the rest and peace which had come to her.

When she married Lord Blessington her love life had not yet
commenced; and, in fact, there could be no love life in such a
marriage--a marriage with a man much older than herself, scatter-
brained, showy, and having no intellectual gifts. So for a time