THE END OF THE BEAUTY.

South Canterbury Times, Issue 4551, 23 November 1887, Page 3

THE END OF THE BEAUTY.

One of the moat beautifulyoung matrons in society has just died—Lady Houghton —a victim to the scarlet fever epidemic, which is the penalty we have had to pay fcir our glorious summer. She married about six years ago the very young innocent, and ingenious son of the very old, sophisticated, disingenious Monckton Milnes, first Baron Houghton. She was a daughter of Sir Frederick Graham of Netherby, and Lady Herraoine, a daughter of the Duke of Somerset. She was thus a granddaughter of the great Sir James Graham, and great great granddaughter of Richard Brindsley Sheridan, the dramatist, and statesman. She and her sisters, Lady Grimston and the Duchess of Montrose, (not the one who goes racing),had all the beau ty,but not much of the wit of the Sheridans. The wit did not outlast the generation of which Mrs Norton and the Duchess of Somerset (Lady Houghton’s grandmother) were the representative women. The Duchess of Somerset, when Countess Seymour, was reckoned the loveliest woman of her time, and presided as “ Queen of Beauty” in the famous “ JSglington tournament,” an odd resuscitation of the age of chivalry held about 1860. I remember the old lady, grown immensely fat, and giving her evidence at Westminster as the defendant in a libel suit brought against her by Dr Charles Williams, the great chest doctor of the last generation. She had accused him of killing her only son, Lord Saint Maur, by mala praxis. Her beauty was all gone, but her bearing and eloquence were splendid to witness. “ I could only account,” she said, in one sensational answer, “for the treatment I received from Dr Williams by supposing that he did not recognise in the pale drudge who had just torn her last petticoat into strips to save her dying son,(the Jane,Duchess of Somerset, whose beauty once enthralled the world, and who now stands before you an old and broken woman.” The doctor won the day by proving that Lord Saint Maur practically killed himself by his eccentric disregard of advice. He was a fine dashing specimen of the madcap Englishman, and was chiefly known to fame as Garibaldi’s ad-jutant-general in his Neapolitan enterprise.