I was first introduced to Melesina Trench (1768-1827) when, as a volunteer at Hampshire Record Office, I was asked to précis some of her letters. I was instantly hooked to a life in archives!  Her writing style was lively and sharp witted and her comments about some of the people she met quite outrageous. In one letter she describes Lady Emma Hamilton as: 'Shape lost in immensity, feet horrible, hands coarse but tolerable & this is the famous beauty - Well, far off cows have long horns, never was I so suprized....Graceful as she is allowed to be in the attitudes she displays after the antique, she is remarkably the reverse in common life & hideously dressed, with a waist in the masse of her neck.  She has borrowed my gown, & certainly will be improved by it'.

On a Hampshire theme, she wrote this poem in 1798 describing an uncomfortable night in a Southampton hostelry (sadly unnamed):

Your amiable letter in prose and in rhyme

(The prose so diverting, the verse so sublime)

Found me musing, alone in a horrible bed:

The bolster was fusty that pillow'd my head,

The matrass no firm elasticity knew

The sheets were not white & the fleas were not few

In sleep from these ills I began to escape

And a dream hover'd near in an exquisite shape

When Sol 'shot thro white curtains' so potent a ray

That my rest was disturbed and my dream fled away

For my windows all commerce with shutters disdain

And gives friendly admittance to sun, wind and rain ....

Extracts from her journals and letters were published in 1862 by her son in a book with the rather unfortunate title 'The Remains of Mrs Richard Trench'.  It was reprinted recently and I am hoping that Hampshire Library Service will be able to get hold of a copy.