according to the common theory, made them unfit to be their husbands' companions or the instructors of their children. Fancy Mr. Wortley taking any trouble to introduce a custom which only saved other people's lives and did himself no immediate advantage! or little George, the second of that blessed name, standing by him in his undertaking! Lady Mary did it, having at once the eye to see, and the heart to dare; and princely Caroline stood by her, with the same breadth of perception and steady valour of soul. It is not to be expected that any such fact, however picturesque, should for a moment stand before the force of theory, but still the story is remarkable in its

way.

Our

expected what romancers call a declaration, he made such passionate love to her, as, in spite of her utmost endeavours to be angry and look grave, provoked an immoderate fit of laughter." It is easy to realize that the ridicule of the fair creature by his side was more bitter to the unhappy little poet than any other punishment could have been. If his heart was really interested, as might very well be from the tone of his letters, what a frightful mortification must have fallen upon him in that burst of laughter! It was enough to turn the milk into gall, the love into hatred. "From that moment he became her implacable enemy," adds the story; but that Pope has fallen a little out of the knowledge of this generation, it would Lady Mary remained in England after be unnecessary to recall the remorseless her return from Constantinople for twenty-lines in which the enchantress is handed one years, during which, no doubt, the down to the justice of posterity. most important events of her life took space forbids us to enter here into one of place, though they are not those in which the bitterest of literary feuds. Lady Mary, we know her best. She was at home, and as we have said, was no harmless sufferer; consequently, except to her sister, the she turned upon her assailant, if it is true wife of the banished Earl of Mar, she wrote that she had a hand in the verses to the but few letters. Whatever cause there Imitator of Horace, with virulence at least might be for the clouds that have rested equal to his own; and even if guiltless in on her good name arose during this period. this respect, spoke of him with a contempt She quarrelled with Pope, and was assailed which, like his bitterness, overshot its mark. by him with a pitiless spite and venom If Lady Mary ever were vulgar, it would be which goes far to defeat itself; she lived in the passage in a letter to Arbuthnot, and shone in London, and enjoyed the so- where she suggests that if Pope is "skilled cial life and triumphs for which her wit and in counterfeiting hands," he will not only talents so well qualified her, and doubtless gratify his malice but increase his fortune did some equivocal things which her biogra- by these means, and so she hopes she will pher is not sorry to have no very distinct see him exalted according to his merits. particulars of. The quarrel with Pope is, But it is hard to be just, or even generous, like other incidents of this part of her life, in a quarrel of this description, and there is left in much uncertainty. What is quite nothing to prove that at the beginning of it clear is, that he wrote to her while she was Lady Mary was to blame. in Turkey frequent letters full of fantastical and elaborate adulation, just warmed with a flicker of real feeling-that he entreated her, on his knees, metaphorically speaking, to go to Twickenham, where, apparently in consequence of his arguments, and to recruit the travellers after their journey, Mr. Wortley took a house. Some time after, the poet, without a word of explanation given, turns from his worship to downright blasphemy, and assaults with every expression of rage and contempt the "Sappho" whom he had heretofore adored. It is true that it was on no meek and silent sufferer that his insults were poured. Lady Mary was quite able to defend herself, and meets him at his own weapons with scorn that equals his, if not with equal powers. But the description she gives of the quarrel is the only one in which there is any vraisemblance. At an unlucky moment, her granddaughter tells us, "when she least

Her entire life worked itself out in these twenty years - the time of her maturity, her highest bloom of beauty, and full force of intellect. Her children, whom she brought back to England infants, grew up, the one to a disreputable and wretched manhood, the other to the life of a fortunate matron and good mother. She had all she had hoped for in the dreary moments of her seclusion, or so at least it would appear. Her letters to her sister afford us, for some time, various glimpses of her satisfaction with her actual circumstances. "I see everybody, but converse with nobody but des amies choisies," she says when she had been for six or seven years established in England, and had arived al mezzo del cammin di nostra vita. "I see the whole town every Sunday, and select a few that I retain to supper; in short, if life could be always what it is, I believe I have so much humility in my temper that I could be contented

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without anything better this two or three when one can have no other nourishment. These hundred years.' "I write to you are my present endeavours; and I run about, at this time piping hot from the birth- though I have five thousand pins and needles night," she says a short time previously; running into my heart. I try to console myself 'my brain warmed with all the agreeable with a small damsel who is at present everything ideas that fine clothes, fine gentlemen, brisk I like; but, alas! she is yet in a white frock. tunes, and lively dances can raise there. At fourteen she may run away with the butler: there's one of the blessed consequences of First you must know that I led up the ball, which you'll stare at; but, what is more, I by the thing present, but it cuts off all future great disappointments: you are not only hurt believe in my conscience I made one of the hopes, and makes your very expectations melanbest figures there; to say truth, people are choly. Quelle vie!" My girl gives me great grown so extravagantly ugly, that we old prospect of satisfaction," she writes a little later; beauties are forced to come out on show-but my young rogue of a son is the most undays to keep the court in countenance." governable little rake that ever played truant." It was the kind of life she had longed for, And again, "I am vexed to the blood by my when it had seemed unattainable; and so young rogue of a son, who has contrived, at his long as her children were babies, it was a age, to make himself the talk of the whole napleasant life: a fact which she acknowl- tion. He is gone knight-erranting, God knows edges with characteristic frankness, though where; and hitherto it is impossible to find him. the acknowledgment is one which, even Nothing that ever happened to me has troubled in the most favourable circumstances, few me so much people care to make. But Lady Mary's satisfaction with her existence does not seem to have lasted longer than that brief lull from anxiety, the moment when her children were young. Probably she had adopted the fashionable mode of dealing with her husband-had given up any expectation of support or tenderness from him, and transferred her hopes, as so many women do, almost without knowing it, to the children, in whom her existence had begun afresh. To Lady Mary, as to so many another mother, this expectation too, the last and most precious, failed like the others. As the years go on, it is in this changed cadence that her thoughts find utterance -a strain still full of courage and unconquerable spirit, but to which their very tone of determined optimism gives an expression more sad than absolute complaint:

"All these things, and five hundred more, convince me (as I have the most profound veneration for the Author of Nature) that we are here in an actual state of punishment: I am satisfied I have been one of the condemned ever since I was born; and, in submission to the divine justice, I don't at all doubt that I deserved it in some former state. I will still hope that I am only in purgatory; and that after whining and grunting a certain number of years, I shall be translated to some more happy sphere, where virtue will be natural and custom reasonable. I grow very devout, as you see, and place all my hopes in the next life, being totally persuaded of the nothing of this. Don't you remember how miserable we were in the little parlour at Thoresby? We then thought marrying would put us at once into possession of all we wanted. Though, after all, I am still of opinion that it is extremely silly to submit to ill fortune. One should pluck up a spirit and live upon cordials,

Thus after her moment of repose, after the disappointments of youth had come to be buried out of sight, and life, no longer craving for actual happiness, had grown contented with the reflection of it-the round of occupation, the chosen friends, the little damsel in her white frock-fate awakes, and the grand tumult recommences. Joy not being possible, the woman had contented herself with peace; but such an escape was not to be. The course of pain begins over again, the lull is over, the storms rise; the "young rogue," by steps that no doubt rang heavier, and ever heavier, upon his mother's heart, sank into a ruined and despicable man, about whose unworthiness even love could not deceive itself; the little maiden grew up and married, and went away. The loneliness which had been too much for her in early days, when it was her husband who forsook her, fell back in full force upon the woman who had now no new life to hope for. She did what it was like her high spirit to do. She fled from it all, with or without the hope that her husband would join her. Like enough, the houses in which abode the ghosts of that child in white, and of that ruined boy, were intolerable to a mind which never could sink into the pathos of desertion. It was her nature to throw off the burden, so far as mortal powers could shake it off. The impatience of a temperament to which monotony was insupportable, drove her to seek remedies, if not of one kind, then of another. She could not have her children back, nor remodel her life. But she could rush away to the ends of the earth, with a desperate tranquillity, which nobody guessed at, and with a faith in her own power of being amused and interested, her own un

1

quenchable vitality, which is pathetic in its utter abstinence from all appeals to our sympathy; not she only, but many a dauntless self-sustaining spirit has made use of the same remedy. She knew that her eyes could not refuse to see, nor her faculties to note, nor her thoughts, which were ever young, to rush into new channels, however heavy the heart might be. And thus at an age when tame natures think themselves beyond all novelties of movement, and take refuge in chimney corners, Lady Mary, incapable of such consolation, arose and fled into new scenes, as many an imprisoned soul at this very day-unable to die, incapable of vegetation, compelled by God's will, and a vitality stronger than all griefs and troubles, to live in the fullest sense of the word-would be but too glad to do. A woman more bound by the real or imaginary bond of duty, more limited by conventional claims and regard for the world's opinion, would no doubt have stayed at home and devoured her heart in silence; but Lady Mary did not care for the world's opinion. Her character for eccentricity, her self-will and independent habits, must all have helped in her decision. When her daughter was married, and her son hopeless, and her life unsupportable, the daring woman at fifty went off alone into new scenes. To such a mind and temperament as hers, it was the natural thing to do.

And no doubt the unsympathetic, respectable critic wonders much how she could have left the everyday life, which was so tempting, and Mr. Wortley's sweet society -why she could not have taken to knotting, and to gossip, and lived as other people did for what reason she could not bear the son's shame and the daughter's absence as other people have to do? And the painstaking literary observer, with this problem before him, roots out gravely from the ashes of the past a M. Ruremonde, a rash French speculator, and disappointed lover, who gave her his money to invest in South Sea stock, and raved at her when it was lost. Perhaps this was the reason why she left England for two-and-twenty years; perhaps the high-minded Wortley sent his wife away. "Causes for this separation have been rumoured, of a nature which, of course, never could have reached her granddaughter, which make it wonderful only that Mr. Wortley should have so long borne with such eccentricities of conduct and temper, and should have arranged the separation with so much feeling and good sense," says one of these sages. But rumours are poor things to hold up before us at a distance of a hundred and thirty years

-and even Horace Walpole, even Pope, has nothing but vague irritation to vent against Lady Mary. And Mr. Wortley's letters after his wife's departure give us for the first time a certain friendliness for the heavy man, who is glad of her comfort in his composed way, and trusts her in their common concerns, and cares for her health and wellbeing. The two would seem after their stormy beginning to have grown into a certain friendship with the years. Perhaps he meant to join her, as several of his letters imply; or perhaps he permitted her to believe that he meant to join her; or perhaps it was held vaguely possible, as a thing that might or might not be, indifferent to the world, not over-interesting even to themselves. They had never been a fond pair-but they never seem to have been more thoroughly friendly, more at their ease with one another, than at the moment when, according to charitable critics, Mr. Wortley, unable to bear it any longer, sent his brilliant wife away. Their correspondence clearly contradicts such a hypothesis, whatever Lady Mary's faults either of temper or conduct might have been. But the fact remains, that at an age when most people begin to feel doubly the want of friends and comforters around them, this woman tore herself up by the roots from the place where she had lived so long, and went forth alone into new scenes and among new faces. She fled into the wilderness like the typical woman of Scripture - where her past happiness could not stare her too closely in the face, nor the present blank of existence crush her quite; where her feuds and controversies and enmities could not affect the new, white, gentle life of her good child, nor the miserable story of her evil one surround her with malicious whispers and the pity of the crowd. It was a strange, unprecedented sort of self-banishment; and yet for such a woman it was a natural thing to do.

Thus we arrive at the last period of Lady Mary's life. We have said that she never was an impassioned woman. No more futile parallel was ever made than that which calls her the English Sevigné. The two natures are as distinct as ever two natures were. It is possible that the character of Madame de Sevigné may have affected and moulded the ideal of her nation, as it cer tainly reaches in her its fullest impersonation. The highest type of excellence to the French mind is the woman who has no passion in her life but that of motherhood, who lives but for her children, and who is made by them, and by the race in general, into a tender idol, worried, no doubt, and vexed

own life, and preserve her independence and personality. In her Italian villa, queen of the alien hamlet, legislator for her neighbour cottages, the English lady took her forlorn yet individual place; filling her days with a thousand occupations, dazzling the strange little world about her with brilliant talk, seeking forgetfulness in books, living and growing old in her own way with a cerdeluding herself with no dreams, forbidding her heart to brood over the past, and making a heroic and partially successful attempt to be sufficient unto herself. We follow her brave spirit through the haze of years with a certain wondering sympathy, a surprised respect. Keep my letters," said Lady Mary, in the hey-day of her life; "they will be as good as Madame de Sevigné's forty years hence." But no sacredness of time and no warmth of appreciation could ever make the two works equal. They spring from an altogether different inspiration, and reveal a totally diverse soul.

and wounded in the ordinary course of ex-mother, would have been a servant for her istence, but always theoretically worshipped. love. Lady Mary could not but live her Madame de Sevigné is the highest type of this saintly creature; more tender, more constant, more impassioned, than any lover, giving all, asking nothing except that little recompense of love which she well knows is but a shadow of her own; content to give up all individual life, to regard the events of her existence only as so many means of interesting or amusing her absent child, living upon that child's recollection, long-tain proud reasonableness and philosophy; ing for her presence, turning every scene around her into a shrine for the object of her soft idolatry. Such is the French woman. Her own many gifts, the tender brilliancy of her genius, her wit, her lively apprehension, are all handmaids to the love which is the one conscious principle of her being. They enable her to woo, with many a gentle art, the perhaps distracted attention of the absent; they furnish her with all those sweet wiles of affection, devices sometimes pathetic, always beautiful, to call back by moments the heart which once was her own, but now has gone from her to the stronger claims of husband and children. One weeps and one smiles over the tender record. Never was purer passion nor self-abandonment more complete.

The period of exile imposed upon herself by this singular woman was almost a third part of her whole life. She was twentytwo years in Italy, not always resident in Lady Mary Wortley is of an entirely dif- the same place, though Venice was her ferent character. Love and longing for the chief abode; and the little watering-place absent may be, and no doubt are, gnawing of Louvere seems to have been her favourat her heart also; but her philosophy is to ite refuge from the summer heats; during make herself independent of these, to oc- which time her correspondence with her cupy herself, to fill the remnant of her life husband and daughter was uninterrupted with interests which may break the force of except by the vicissitudes of the post, and that painful longing. Instead of concentrat- the contrariety of ambassadors and consuls. ing her heart and thoughts upon the chance Even then in her waning years she was not of a momentary meeting now and then, which an inoffensive personage; but always a womay cheat with a semblance of reunion only man of mark, making enemies as well as to pierce the sufferer with new pangs of friends. These letters undergo a gradual parting, she makes up her mind with a stern change as her life changes. From London but not ignoble philosophy that all such she had written to her sister as one woman sweet possibilities are over. She takes her- of the world, active and full of life, might self away to hide her solitude, to withdraw be expected to write to another. In her the shadow of her deserted life from that Italian correspondence her voice grows of her child. She sets forth in her letters sober, her style composed. It is the wisall her surroundings, all her occupations, dom of years, not lofty, but yet full of not by way of amusing her correspondent sense and reason, and unexaggerated realialone, but by way of showing that her own ty. She gives her opinion with the fulness life is yet worth living, and her individuality of detail and calm of experience which beunimpaired. It is possible that in this steady long to her age; but she does not insist on and unfaltering purpose there may be almost her opinion being received. She consents a higher principle of affection than that which to the different views of her daughter with moves the tender outpourings of the other mother's heart; but it is the tenderness of a stoic, content to take what is possible, and to resign what cannot be hoped for, and not the effusion of love which dies for a response. Madame de Sevigné, but for the soft dignity which was inalienable from her as her child's LIVING AGE. VOL. X. 390

a quiet tolerance. "You see I was not mistaken in supposing we should have disputes concerning your daughters, if we were together, since we can differ even at this distance," she writes, apparently after receiving her daughter's reply to two or three long and careful letters upon education.