Note 44 — Chapter V

In 1837, when I visited Lady Hester Stanhope again, I was reading Wraxall’s Memoirs, where he says, “There was something about Mr. E***, that one could not feel confidence in him;” and Lady Hester Stanhope interrupted me by saying, “That was the reason that Mr. Pitt would not marry his daughter. She was unlike all the other sisters. The mother, like a hen with her chickens, would sit sometimes at a party, and almost devour a peer, to see if she could get him for one of them. There they were, all open-mouthed, ready to eat him up.”