Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Carlyle's laugh and other surprises

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XIV. one of Thackeray's women

Some years since, there passed away, at Newport, Rhode Island, one who could justly be classed with Thackeray's women; one in whom Lady Kew would have taken delight; one in whom she would have found wit and memory and audacity rivaling her own; one who was at once old and young, poor and luxurious, one of the loneliest of human beings, and yet one of the most sociable. Miss Jane Stuart, the only surviving daughter of Gilbert Stuart, the painter, had dwelt all her life on the edge of art without being an artist, and at the brink of fashion without being fashionable. Living at times in something that approached poverty, she was usually surrounded by friends who were rich and generous; so that she often fulfilled Motley's famous early saying, that one could do without the necessaries of life, but could not spare the luxuries. She was an essential part of the atmosphere of Newport; living near the “Old Stone Mill,” she divided its celebrity and, as all agreed, its doubtful antiquity; for her most intimate friends could not really guess within fifteen years how old she was, and