SD2696. Lady Westmorland to Julian Fane
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 31, 303–304 (in part).
[London]
May 9, 1864.
Have I told you Lady William’s fun about the “Angel Gabriel”? There exists in some suburb of this city a spinster of a certain age named Miss Gabriel, who writes verses, composes songs, and gives dinners to literary and artistic gentlemen. As she lives alone, Lady William took it into her head she was not respectable. I believe she is quite respectable as well as frightfully plain, and she has even some aristocratic female acquaintance. I saw her last week at a morning concert at Lord Dudley’s. Our friend Browning made her acquaintance, and in his enthusiastic way was enchanted with her good manners, good dinners, and agreeable conversation; and was always “dining with Miss Gabriel” when Lady William wanted him. One day she asked me if I had seen him lately. I said, “No, not for an age”; on which she exclaimed, “Oh, my dear, that Angel Gabriel!”
Next day he happened to call on me, and I told him the joke, and that he must tranquillise Lady William. You know he cannot understand a joke; so he went to Lady William to inform her that she was his old friend and Miss Gabriel only an agreeable acquaintance, and that he did not really consider her an angel, though she was charming, etc. etc.
Text: Rachel Weigall, Lady Rose Weigall (London, 1923), pp. 132–133.
___________________
