The great Duke of Wellington was, of course, well known to the Ladies. They had known him from a boy. It was from an old Spanish Prayer Book given him by Lady Eleanor that he learnt that language when going out to his campaigns in the Peninsula.

Reminiscences of this queer old couple abound in the published diaries and correspondence of old-time travellers; but none afford so good a picture as that drawn by Lockhart, who accompanied Sir Walter Scott on a visit to Llangollen in 1825. Lockhart, writing to his wife, says: “We proceeded up the hill, and found everything about them and their habitation odd and extravagant beyond report. Imagine two women—one apparently seventy and the other sixty-five—dressed in heavy blue riding habits, enormous shoes, and men’s hats, with their petticoats so tucked up that at the first glance of them, fussing and tottering about their porch in the agony of expectation, we took them for a couple of hazy or crazy old sailors. On nearer inspection they both wear a world of brooches, rings, etc., and Lady Eleanor positively orders—several stars and crosses, and a red ribbon, exactly like a K.C.B. To crown all, they have cropt heads, shaggy, rough, bushy, and as white as snow, the one with age alone, the other assisted by a sprinkling of powder. The elder lady is almost blind, and every way much decayed; the other in good preservation. But who could paint the prints, the dogs, the cats, the miniatures, the cram of cabinets, clocks, glass cases, books, bijouterie, dragon china, nodding mandarins, and whirligigs of every shape and hue—the whole house, outside and in (for we must see everything, to the dressing closets) covered with carved oak, very rich and fine some of it; and the illustrated copies of Sir Walter’s poems, and the joking, simpering compliments about Waverley and the anxiety to know who Melvor really was, and the absolute devouring of the poor Unknown, who had to carry off, besides all the rest, one small bit of literal butter dug up in a Milesian stone jar lately from the bottom of some Irish bog. Great romance (i.e., absurd innocence of character) one must have looked for; but it was confounding to find this mixed up with such eager curiosity and enormous knowledge of the tattle and scandal of the world they had so long left. Their tables were piled with newspapers from every corner of the kingdom, and they seemed to have the deaths and marriages of the antipodes at their fingers’ ends. Their albums and autographs, from Louis XVIII. and George IV. down to magazine poets and quack doctors, are a museum. I shall never see the spirit of blue stockingism again in such perfect incarnation. Peveril (a family name for Sir Walter) won’t get over their final kissing match for a week. Yet it is too bad to laugh at these good old girls; they have long been the guardian angels of the village, and are worshipped by every man, woman, and child about them.”

The collecting mania grew upon the old women with the passing of the years. They had long converted their cottage from a labourer’s dwelling to the likeness of a curiosity shop, and had begged or bought all the ancient Elizabethan, Carolean, and Jacobean carved wooden four-poster bedsteads within a circle of twenty miles from Llangollen, to decorate the interior and exterior of Plas Newydd; but their passion for old oak was insatiable. The posts of the black oak porch and the other profusely carved oak decorations that front the house to this day were placed here by them. Here is still the famous carved frieze of cat and acorns that they went into raptures over, and opposite is the little dog, also in black oak, with which, after years of anxious waiting and searching, they matched the cat. So wedded to this passion for old oak did the Ladies become that no one was welcome as a visitor who did not bring with him an offering of this sort. They were proud of their house. “When we fust came home,” Lady Eleanor was wont to say, drawing a word-picture of the place, “then and afterwards, we had only bare walls and a roof.” Then they would point out the trees they had planted in the garden; and the laylocks that made so fragrant a bank of blooms in the spring. (They, in common with others of their order, continued to say “fust,” and “laylock,” and “obleege” when merely common people had adopted what is now the usual pronunciation.)

Well, well: the trees are more beautiful now than ever they could have been before, but the ladies are gone. Their servant died in 1809; Lady Eleanor, in her 90th year, in 1829, and Miss Ponsonby two years later. But the interior of the house is much the same: rich in oak so black as to absorb much of the light; with a wealth of beautiful old china and miscellaneous odds and ends that would have delighted the soul of Horace Walpole. These collections owe much of their completeness to the late General Yorke, who had known the two ladies, and rescued the houseful of curiosities from utter dispersal at the sale by auction, conducted by that George Robins whose extravagant auctioneering eloquence has become a classic. In his words, the grounds of Plas Newydd occupied “a wooded knoll, overhanging a deep and hallowed glen”; language that may compare favourably with Wordsworth’s sonnet.

We have seen Lockhart excusing himself for laughing at these “good old girls,” as he calls them, and have his word for it that they were “the guardian angels of the village”; but whatever they may have done in their lifetime has been quite thrown into the background by the posthumous benefits their fame has conferred upon Llangollen. Local charities until recently benefited largely from the fees charged to visitors curious to see the collections at Plas Newydd; but since a party of thieves and vandals broke some of the objects and stole others the house has not been so readily accessible. It would be quite impossible for a stranger to visit Llangollen for even the shortest space of time and then to come away ignorant of the Ladies, for photographs of them, statuettes, and paintings abound at every turn, and must prove an important source of revenue. It is no more possible to flee from the Ladies of Llangollen in Llangollen than it is to avoid Lorna Doone at Ilfracombe, or Shakespeare at Stratford-on-Avon.