the wreck of a great establishment such as her own. Of the scene
in Gore House Mr. Madden, Lady Blessington's literary biographer,
has written:

Numerous creditors, bill-discounters, money-lenders, jewelers,
lace-venders, tax-collectors, gas-company agents, all persons
having claims to urge pressed them at this period simultaneously.
An execution for a debt of four thousand pounds was at length put
in by a house largely engaged in the silk, lace, India-shawl, and
fancy-jewelry business.

This sum of four thousand pounds was only a nominal claim, but it
opened the flood-gates for all of Lady Blessington's creditors.
Mr. Madden writes still further:

On the 10th of May, 1849, I visited Gore House for the last time.
The auction was going on. There was a large assemblage of people
of fashion. Every room was thronged; the well-known library-salon,
in which the conversaziones took place, was crowded, but not with
guests. The arm-chair in which the lady of the mansion was wont to
sit was occupied by a stout, coarse gentleman of the Jewish
persuasion, busily engaged in examining a marble hand extended on
a book, the fingers of which were modeled from a cast of those of
the absent mistress of the establishment. People, as they passed
through the room, poked the furniture, pulled about the precious
objects of art and ornaments of various kinds that lay on the
table; and some made jests and ribald jokes on the scene they
witnessed.

At this compulsory sale things went for less than half their