Gummidge for
tearful sentiment, and culpably indifferent to the smiles of beauty.
James is greatly misunderstood: the romance of his youth--sword and
cloak and disguise, pistol, dagger and poison, prepared for him; story
of true love blighted by a humorous cast of destiny; voyages, perils,
shipwrecks, dances at inns--all is forgotten or is unknown.
Meanwhile, who was her 'Oglethorpean majesty,' and why does the
pamphleteer of 1716 talk of 'James Stuart, _alias_ Oglethorpe'? By a
strange combination of his bad luck, James is called Miss Oglethorpe's
ungrateful lover by Thackeray, and Miss Oglethorpe's brother by the
pamphleteer, and by Whig slander in general. Thackeray, in fact, took
Miss Oglethorpe from the letter which Bolingbroke wrote to Wyndham,
after St. Germains found him out, as St. James's had done, for a
traitor. Bolingbroke merely mentions Fanny Oglethorpe as a busy
intriguer. There is no evidence that she ever was at Bar-le-Duc in her
life, none that she ever was 'Queen Oglethorpe.' We propose to tell,
for the first time, the real story of this lady and her sisters.
The story centres round The Meath Home for Incurables! This excellent
institution occupies Westbrook Place, an old house at Godalming, close
to the railway, which passes so close as to cut off one corner of the
park, and of the malodorous tanyard between the remnant of grounds and
the river Wey that once washed them.
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