Part 1

[Illustration:

Mrs. WALTER BOWNE

From a miniature by Malbone, in possession of W. B. Lawrence

ARTOTYPE, E. BIERSTADT, N. Y. ]

A GIRL’S LIFE EIGHTY YEARS AGO SELECTIONS FROM THE LETTERS OF ELIZA SOUTHGATE BOWNE

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY CLARENCE COOK

_ILLUSTRATED WITH PORTRAITS AND VIEWS_

NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 1887

Copyright, 1887, BY CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS.

_The Riverside Press, Cambridge_: Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

_MRS. WALTER BOWNE_ _Frontispiece_ _Miniature by Malbone_

_Facing Page_ _DR. ROBERT SOUTHGATE—MRS. SOUTHGATE_ _5_ _From Silhouettes in the possession of W. B. Lawrence, Esq._

_MRS. JOHN DERBY_ (_Eleanor Coffin_) _22_ _Miniature by Malbone, in possession of Miss Rogers, of Boston_

_RUFUS KING_ _42_ _From a painting by Woods_

_MRS. RUFUS KING_ _68_ _After a portrait by Trumbull_

_MR. E. HASKET DERBY, OF SALEM_ (_Æt. 28, 1794_) _110_ _From a Miniature in possession of Dr. Hasket Derby, of Boston_

_MRS. RICHARD DERBY_ (_Martha Coffin_) _116_ _Miniature by Malbone, in possession of Mrs. Peabody, of Boston_

_THE VAN RENSSELAER MANOR HOUSE_ _130_

_MR. WALTER BOWNE_ _140_ _Miniature by Malbone_

_THE LYMAN PLACE—WALTHAM_ _148_

_LUCIA WADSWORTH—ZILPAH WADSWORTH_ _159_ _From Silhouettes in the possession of W. B. Lawrence, Esq._

_SUNSWICK—THE DELAFIELD HOUSE, HELL GATE, LONG ISLAND_ _167_

_THE BOWNE HOUSE, FLUSHING_ _195_ _Erected 1661_

_JAMES GORE KING_ _206_ _From a Miniature in the possession of A. Gracie King, Esq._

_CHARLES KING_ _210_ _From a Miniature in the possession of his daughter, Mrs. Martin._

INTRODUCTION.

Eliza Southgate, the writer of the letters here collected, was the daughter of Robert and Mary Southgate, and was born in Scarborough, Me., September 24, 1783. She was the third in a family of twelve children. Her father came of English stock, and was born in Leicester, Mass., where his family had long been settled. Here he studied medicine, and when he had finished his course he left his native place, where there appeared to be no room for another practitioner, and settled in Scarborough. We are told that, after the primitive fashion of the time, he set out to seek his fortune on horseback, with all his worldly goods in a pair of saddle-bags. In this way he entered Scarborough, where his character and talents were not long in getting him a good position. He had picked up some law, and in a new and small community was able to make his knowledge useful, so that in course of time he was appointed a Judge in the Court of Common Pleas.

He had not been long in Scarborough before he married Mary, the daughter of Richard King, a large landholder in the District of Maine. “Pretty Polly King,” as Mary was familiarly called by her friends, was the second daughter of Mr. King by his first wife. The eldest child by this marriage was Rufus—well known for the distinguished part he played in the early history of our country. A third child, Pauline, married Mr. Porter; their son Moses, whose name often occurs in these letters, was a young man of great promise. He engaged his cousin Eliza in a correspondence, after the somewhat formal fashion of the time; only her letters remain to indicate its character, but they are among her best. In her lively tilting on the well-worn subject of the education of the sexes, the lady shows herself a clever mistress of the foils, and there are not wanting indications that the combatants did not escape from the encounter heart-whole. But however this may have been, all was ended by the sudden death of Mr. Porter from a fever caught in boarding an infected vessel in the transaction of some necessary business.

Scarborough was not a large town, but its position as a seaport gave it some importance, and the society was far above what is ordinarily met with in such places. The Hunnewells, Bragdons, Bacons, Emersons, Wadsworths, names that are distinguished in the social history of New England, belong to the early settlers of the neighborhood, and are still represented there. Zilpah, one of the daughters of General Peleg Wadsworth, who are frequently mentioned in these letters, married Stephen Longfellow, a cousin of Mrs. Southgate, and became the mother of the poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

The Southgates gave their children the best education to be had in those times. They were first sent to school in Scarborough; but, later, were placed—to be “finished,” as the old phrase was—at boarding-schools near Boston. When she was fourteen years old, Eliza was sent to a school at Medford, and a letter written from that place gives a rather uncomfortable notion of her surroundings. In these few childish lines, however, the character of the woman is plainly prefigured—her observation, her power of clear, terse statement, her playful humor, her cheerful submission to duty, and her affection for her parents, making her willing to put up with whatever was disagreeable rather than give them uneasiness. However, Dr. Southgate, as a physician, could see that a school where the pupils slept, four beds in a small chamber and two in a bed, was not the place for a growing girl, and he therefore took his daughter away and put her at the school at Medford, kept by Mrs. Rowson. This, for its time, was an excellent school, and Miss Southgate remained there until the day came when “studies” were to be thrown aside, and “life” was to begin. She seems by her letters to have been very happy while under Mrs. Rowson’s care—the varied and somewhat romantic life led by that lady perhaps fitted her, better than would have been thought, to be the guide and friend of a girl of Eliza Southgate’s peculiar character.[1]

Her life after she left school is so fully described in her letters that there is no need of following it in detail. She tells her own story far better than another could do it, and much that would inevitably be dull and commonplace narrated in plain prose, sparkles with life under the swift pen of this lively girl. She tells of her visit to Saratoga, with her friends Mr. and Mrs. Hasket Derby; and no school-girl of our time, writing from Paris or London, could describe the wonders of her tour with greater ecstasy. She sees this new corner of the world with the miracle-working eye of youth, and accepts everything with youth’s unquestioning heart. Previous letters had described Salem in terms equally ecstatic, and after her account of the country-seat of the Derbys, there could be nothing left to say of Versailles or St. Cloud. But what then? Was not this a fine old country-house, with its formal garden, its provincial but still solid stateliness, and, above all, with its hearty, cheerful hospitality? It was our heroine’s first glimpse of the gay world of fashion of her time, and she enjoyed it to the full.

The story of her first meeting with her future husband, of her engagement to him, of their wedding-journey, is told with the simplicity and unaffected candor that were characteristic of her. The letter to her mother in which she asks her consent to the marriage, shows mother and daughter in the happiest light; it is the highest praise that could be awarded the training the Southgates had given their children. Perfect love had bred perfect confidence, and it is certainly pleasant to know that the hearts and judgments of the parents could only confirm the decision of their daughter. Mr. Walter Bowne was everything that the most exacting parents could wish as the husband of a daughter so dear to them.

But the new life of happiness thus entered upon was brief, and in a few months more than six years it had come to an end. In 1803 Mr. Bowne and Miss Southgate were married. In 1806 their first child, a boy, named Walter, after his father, was born; and two years later, in July, 1808, came their second child, a girl, named Mary, after Mrs. Bowne’s mother. After the birth of this child, Mrs. Bowne did not recover her strength, and as winter was coming on, the medical men recommended a sea-voyage and a visit to a warmer climate. It was determined to send the invalid to Charleston, S. C.; and accordingly Mrs. Bowne set out, accompanied by her sister Octavia and her husband, Mr. Browne, leaving Mr. Bowne in New York, where he had some business-affairs to settle before he should join his wife later in the season. Unhappily, the sea-voyage proved a disastrous experiment; and when the party arrived at Charleston, Mrs. Bowne was in so enfeebled a condition from its effects that her sister gave up all hope of saving her life. She failed rapidly, and died on the 20th of February, only two months after her arrival. Mr. Bowne, who, in common with her family, had probably no idea of the serious nature of his wife’s illness when she left New York, yet made all the haste he could to follow her, but had the inexpressible grief to arrive too late. His only consolation was in the fact that her suffering had been brief, and that her departure was serene, while all that a sister’s affectionate devotion could avail to comfort her had been given without stint from a full heart; and even strangers in a strange city had been moved, by the beauty and loveliness of this young mother, and by her pitiful case, deprived of husband and children, to shield her and cheer her with all that the warmhearted Southern hospitality knows so well to bestow. She was buried in Charleston and her grave was hid in flowers sent by the people of the town and the neighboring plantations, many of whom had only heard her name and story.

There is little need for an editor’s help in following the story of the life which these letters portray. They are, in fact, an almost complete diary of that life, for the earliest bears date when the writer was a child at boarding-school, and the last was written only a few days before she died. Of the years that came between, the record is almost uninterrupted; so that the task confided to me resolves itself into little more than a statement of the few facts connected with the personal and family history of their author, that naturally have no place in the letters themselves.

No doubt we have gained much, so far as the material convenience of the great public life is concerned, from the inventions that, for all practical purposes, have reduced time and space to comparative insignificance. We have, however, lost some good things, which those who lived in younger days must always regret, and for which there is small compensation in the material gain we have received in exchange. Among these losses, that of letter-writing is perhaps the most serious. A whole world of innocent enjoyment for contemporaries and for posterity has been blotted out, and, so far as appears, nothing is taking its place. Is it the newspapers? But how scattered, how disjointed, how impersonal, the record they contain! We might as well hope to recall the charm of some old garden loved in youth, by turning over the leaves of a _herbarium_ in which its flowers had been pressed, as to make the domestic life of a time gone by, live again in reading the files of a newspaper. Nor do memoirs or biographies give us what we want. They are too formal, too self-conscious; they want the spontaneity, the vividness of impression, the lightness of the recording hand. These things letters give us, and letters alone.

Science has many fairy-tales to tell us, but the most magical of all her inventions is that toy, the phonograph, invented by our own Edison. It listens to the words that are whispered in its ear, to the songs that are sung to it, to the gossip that buzzes about it, and the record made on its revolving surface, replaced at any time upon the cylinder—after the lapse of an hour, or of a hundred years—will repeat what has been confided to it in the very voice of the speaker, with every tone and every inflection as clear as when first it spoke.

Familiar letters are privileged to play the same magical part. To the readers of successive generations, they speak with the living voice of the writer; they recall the fugitive emotions, the joys, the sorrows, the whims, the passions, and as we read we persuade ourselves that we are part and parcel of the times they record.

What a difference in our enjoyment it would make, were the letters of Fanny Burney and Horace Walpole taken from us! Even Hannah More becomes entertaining; for though her circle was a narrow one, there were delightful people in it, and the letters make us at home in her little world, as no formal biography could do.

Nowadays no one writes letters, and no one would have time to read them if they were written. Little notes fly back and forth, like swallows, between friend and friend, between parent and child, carrying the news of the day in small morsels easily digested; it is not worth while to tell the whole story with the pen, when it can be told in a few weeks, at the farthest, with the voice. For nobody now is more than a few weeks from anywhere. In the spring my neighbor came home with his wife from the Philippine Islands, to pass a few weeks with his friends and hers. Yesterday he ran back to the islands, to buckle to business again. Why take the trouble while here to detail the gossip of his home-circle to his Philippine friends, in letters, when in a fortnight or so he would be recounting it to them at their own tables?

The letters here printed have more than the interest of contemporary records; they paint in words, with a thousand delicate and expressive touches, the portrait of a lively and beautiful girl, with a character as striking and individual as the face that Malbone has drawn for us on ivory. Never was a reigning beauty more spirited, never was a spirited girl of fashion more truly lovable, than Eliza Bowne. Whether she be at boarding-school, writing letters to her “honored parents,” and hiding her little homesick heart in vain under the formal phrases dictated by the starched decorum of the day; or stealing an hour for her pen amid the whirl of the gay world in which she sparkled, such a cheerful star, and rattling off to her mother the story of the day’s doings—she is always the same generous, unselfish creature; impulsive, but with her impulses well in hand; a heart brimming over with mirth, its clear crystal clouded by no drop of malice; witty, but with a friendly glint in her mischievous eyes, even when, as now and then happens, she gives formality or presumption a fillip. Love and friendship followed her wherever she went in her too brief span of life, and fortune heaped her girlish lap with all good things; but she showed herself worthy of her blessings, and kept herself unspotted from the world.

Something should be said of the literary merit of these letters. The name of Richardson has been mentioned; but Richardson never wrote anything so fresh from the heart, so playful in their sincerity, as some of the letters to her cousin, Moses Porter; nor could Richardson have touched with so light a hand the story of the drive home in the snow-storm after the Assembly ball, or the account of the game of Loo, when, with a fluttering heart, she stands, divided between the eager desire to read the letter she has just slipped into her pocket, and the impatient calls of her partners to join them at the game. Fanny Burney, and Fanny Burney alone, could have written letters like these.

They are not, however, the letters of a practised writer, nor was there ever in her mind any thought of publication. It was the age of “epistolary correspondence:” all the girls of Miss Southgate’s acquaintance were writing letters to their friends, long ones, often, made up in the manner of a diary, with a week’s doings recorded day by day; for postage was dear, and to send blank paper an extravagance, and no doubt, like her friends, she forgot her letters as soon as they were sent off. Her correspondents were not so indifferent, however, and they kept her letters carefully. Her mother, to whom the most of them were written, left those sent to herself as a bequest to her granddaughter, Mrs. John W. Lawrence, the “little Mary” of the later letters. Mrs. Bowne died in the same year in which this daughter was born; but her sister-in-law, Miss Caroline Bowne, who devoted herself to the care of the little girl after her mother’s death, instilled into her heart such an affection for her parent’s memory that she came to cherish it with an almost religious devotion, and guarded as a sacred relic everything that had belonged to her. To the letters left her by her grandmother, Mrs. Lawrence added all she could collect from other persons with whom her mother had corresponded. They came to her in a sad state, from much reading and passing about from hand to hand; and to preserve their contents she copied the whole collection, with the greatest care, in her neat, methodical handwriting, into two small books, and these, in her turn, she bequeathed to her children, as her grandmother had bequeathed the originals to her.

They are now given to the public, enriched with a considerable number of contemporary portraits and other illustrations, carefully reproduced from original miniatures and old prints; and with an abundance of biographical notes, industriously collected by a competent hand, which cannot fail to be of value to the social chronicler of our time. While the importance of these letters as illustrations of the domestic life of our country at a most interesting time is considerable, their chief value, after all, lies in the picture they give of the writer. It is a picture drawn, as we have said, with a thousand graceful touches, and the natural girlish loveliness of the portraiture shows best when it is read from end to end. Then, as we look up from the printed page to Malbone’s portrait, the vision takes shape:

“A hair-brained, sentimental trace Was strongly markèd in her face; A wildly witty, rustic grace Shone full upon her; Her eye, even turned on empty space, Beamed keen with honour.”

CLARENCE COOK.

FISHKILL-ON-HUDSON, October 1, 1887.

A GIRL’S LIFE EIGHTY YEARS AGO

Medford, Jan. 23, 1797.

My Mamma:

I went to Boston last Saturday, and there I received your letter. I have now to communicate to you only my wishes to tarry in Boston a quarter, if convenient. In my last letter to my Father I did not say anything respecting it because I did not wish Mrs. Wyman to know I had an inclination to leave her school, but only because I thought you would wish me to come home when my quarter was out. I have a great desire to see my family, but I have a still greater desire to finish my education.

Still I have to beg you to remind my friends and acquaintances that I remain the same Eliza, and that I bear the same love I ever did to them, whether they have forgotten me or not.

Tell my little Brothers and Sisters I want to see them very much indeed. Write me an answer as soon as you can conveniently. I shall send you some of my work which you never have seen,—it is my Arithmetic.

Permit me, my Honored Mother, to claim the title of

Your affectionate daughter, ELIZA SOUTHGATE.

Mrs. Mary Southgate.

Medford, May 12, 1797.

Honored Parents:

With pleasure I sit down to the best of parents to inform them of my situation, as doubtless they are anxious to hear,—permit me to tell them something of my foolish heart. When I first came here I gave myself up to reflection, but not pleasing reflections. When Mr. Boyd[2] left me I burst into tears and instead of trying to calm my feelings I tried to feel worse. I begin to feel happier and will soon gather up all my Philosophy and think of the duty that now attends me, to think that here I may drink freely of the fountain of knowledge, but I will not dwell any longer on this subject. I am not doing anything but writing, reading, and cyphering. There is a French Master coming next Monday, and he will teach French and Dancing. William Boyd and Mr. Wyman advise me to learn French, yet if I do at all I wish you to write me very soon what you think best, for the school begins on Monday. Mr. Wyman says it will not take up but a very little of my time, for it is but two days in the week, and the lessons only 2 hours long. Mr. Wyman says I must learn Geometry before Geography, and that I better not begin it till I have got through my Cyphering.

[Illustration:

DR. ROBERT SOUTHGATE MRS. SOUTHGATE

From Silhouettes in the possession of W. B. Lawrence, Esq. ]

We get up early in the morning and make our beds and sweep the chamber, it is a chamber about as large as our kitchen chamber, and a little better finished. There’s 4 beds in the chamber, and two persons in each bed, we have chocolate for breakfast and supper.

Your affectionate Daughter ELIZA SOUTHGATE.

Medford, May 25, 1797.

My dear Parents:

I hope I am in some measure sensible of the great obligation I am under to you for the inexpressible kindness and attention which I have received of you from the cradle to my present situation in school. Many have been your anxious cares for the welfare of me, your child, at every stage and period of my inexperienced life to the present moment. In my infancy you nursed and reared me up, my inclinations you have indulged and checked my follies—have liberally fed me with the bounty of your table, and from your instructive lips I have been admonished to virtue, morality, and religion. The debt of gratitude I owe you is great, yet I hope to repay you by duly attending to your counsels and to my improvement in useful knowledge.

My thankful heart with grateful feelings beat, With filial duty I my Parents greet, Your fostering care hath reared me from my birth, And been my Guardians, since I’ve been on earth, With love unequalled taught the surest way, And Check’d my passions when they went astray. I wish and trust to glad declining years,— Make each heart gay—each eye refrain from tears. When days are finished and when time shall cease May you be wafted to eternal peace

Is the sincere wish of your dutiful Daughter,

ELIZA SOUTHGATE.

Robert Southgate Esqr. & Lady.

Medford, June 13, 1797.

Dear Mother: