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"The sort of learning," she adds, that I reluctant love; but a composed observer, recommended is not so expensive, either of reticent and unexacting upon others, betime or money, as dancing, and, in my cause she has wisely preserved a life of her opinion, likely to be of much more use to own. That life is not one that could have Lady, if her memory and apprehension had many charms for a less powerful or are what you represented them to me. self-sustaining spirit; but there is in it an However, every one has a right to educate inalienable dignity of self-command, and their children their own way, and I shall that mingled submission to, and resistance speak no more on that subject." Thus she of, the fatal coil of circumstances which diswithdraws from every appearance of con- play the highest qualities of humanity. troversy. Her life had been marked by Lady Mary submitted and made the best broils enough, but here it is evident she put of the changes which she could not help, but force on herself, and would give no excuse at the same time she made props to herself for estrangement. And as even this sub- of her own abounding vital force, of her ject, which she felt herself to be an authority faculty of amusement, even of the eccenon, was dangerous ground, the exile, in her tricities of her character, to save herself wonderful self-control, turns from it with- from being crushed by them. In doing so, out a word of reproach, and goes back to she transgressed many of the chief articles the subject of her vineyards and gardens, in the code of respectability, which ordains her villages and her books. She tells her that a woman, when lonely and abandoned, daughter how she has sat up all night over shall make up her mind to it, and die or Clarissa Harlowe,' and wept over it; but sink into apathy without showing any frivoadds the most sagacious criticism upon the lous inclinations towards a life which the defects of the school of fiction to which it world has pronounced over for her. The belongs, and the book's individual weak-woman whose story we have so far traced nesses. "I fancy you are now saying, 'tis a sad thing to grow old," she says at the end of a long letter on literary subjects, with a half apology, which is wonderfully pathetic. "What does my poor mamma mean by troubling me with criticisms on books which nobody but herself has ever read? You must allow something to my solitude. I have a pleasure in writing to my dear child, and not many subjects to write upon." Thus she lives her solitary life, and takes what forlorn pleasure she can out of it. "I find by experience more sincere pleasures with my books and garden than all the flutter of a court could give me," she says. But the picture has taken a sober colouring; an air of loneliness breathes through it. Not the restless palpitating loneliness of the young Lady Mary, years before, on the Hinchinbroke terrace, when all the brilliant world lay within reach, yet the robin-redbreast, with good-humour and humanity," alone bore her company; but a calm solitude, undisturbed by anticipation, and without hope. Resolution steady and gentle, yet almost stern in its constancy, inspires the strange record. Never to murmur at the inevitable, to be no burden, no shadow upon any one, to make the best of her life, and get some good out of its most unpromising conditions; to be herself, let everything change around her. Such is the quiet determination that underlies all her pretty descriptions, all her accounts of places and people, her criticisms and her arguments. She is no melancholy suppliant bidding for pity, striving after a

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was not one who could die, or who could consent to be crushed into inanity. She fled from that life-in-death. It was not possible to her to do less than live so long as existence lasted; and we believe it would be better for humanity, better for our common chances of happiness, if the wounded, the lonely, and the deserted shared her instinctive wisdom, and asserted their forlorn right to such existence as suited their ecnstitutions, instead of sinking into the tedium of forced uniformity, as so many shipwrecked people do.

It is curious to turn from the subdued yet lifelike colours of this picture to the daub marked with the same name on the walls of Horace Walpole's endless gallery. She was old when he met her at Florence, and he was not the sort of young man whom an ancient beauty would inspire with any respectful or sympathetic feeling. Although she found him "wonderfully civil," Lady Mary was an old hag to the lively youth, as old women of every description often are in the eyes of the younger generation. "Her dress, her avarice, and her impudence must amaze any one that never heard her name," says Horace. "She wears a foul mob that does not cover her greasy black locks, that hang down never combed nor curled; an old mazarine blue wrapper that gapes open and discovers a canvass petticoat; the face swelled violently on one side, partly cov ered with a plaster, and partly with white paint, which for cheapness she has bought so coarse that you would not use it to wash a chimney. In three words I will give you

her picture as we drew it in the sortes Virgiliana

"Insanum vatem aspicies."

ures as far as human nature can.

You

"Solitude begets whimsies; at my time of life one usually falls into those that are melancholy, though I endeavour to keep up a certain sprightly folly that (I thank God) I was born "With. My chief study all my life has been to lighten misfortunes and multiply pleasknow I am enthusiastic in my friendships. I also hear from all hands of my daughter's prosperity; you, madam, who are a mother, may judge of my pleasure in her happiness, though I have no taste for that sort of felicity. I could never endure with patience the austerities of a court life. I was saying every day from my heart (while I was condemned to it), The things that I would do, these I do not; and the things I would not do, these do I daily; and I had rather be a sister of St. Clara than lady of the bedchamber to any lady in Europe. It is not age and disappointment that have given me these sentiments; you may see them in a copy of verses sent from Constantinople in my early tended indiscretion shown about, copies taken, youth to my uncle Fielding, and by his well-inand at last miserably printed. I own myself such a rake I prefer liberty to chains of diamonds, and when I hold my peace (like King David) it is pain and grief to me."

I give you my honour we did not choose it." This description chimes in badly with the idea conveyed by her letters; but yet, alas, the evidence of tradition would seem to prove, as might be made plain by various unsavoury and unquotable anecdotes, that Lady Mary was not distinguished by that scrupulous regard to cleanliness of person which is one of the chief articles nowadays in the social code. It was not of the first importance then, and we fear there is nothing to be said on this subject for the old woman of fashion. When the Prince of Wales bade his wife observe how becomingly Lady Mary was dressed, he gave her the only tribute which in this particular she ever seems to have received. Even in her earliest years she herself expressed boldly her indifference and almost contempt for dress; and though she warms to a certain degree of womanly enthusiasm about the decorations of the harem, her admiration was stimulated by many extraneous causes. Possibly the young people in the Florentine Mr. Wortley died in 1761, leaving bepalaces, when they gazed at the old English- hind him an enormous fortune. Whether woman, with her careless garb and her the family business connected with this strange reputation, laughed with Horace brought Lady Mary to England, or whether Walpole; a circumstance with which we, she was drawn home by the instinct of all whose aim is to draw the picture of her dying creatures, we are not informed. It mind and heart from materials which she is evident, however, that her return had alone could furnish, have but a secondary been spoken of for some time previously. concern. But at the same time the contrast "I have outlived the greatest part of my between the sketch made from without and the acquaintance," she writes in the year 1760; picture which grows under her own fingers" and, to say the truth, a return to crowd within is worth notice. No doubt there are other instances, as well as that of Lady Mary, in which the old-fashioned figure, worn with age, and subject to all the quips and cranks of time, yet clinging with what seems an unnatural frivolity to the amusements of the world, at which the young people laugh, would be found, if the spectator looked deeper, to be but balancing itself by these contemptible means on the frail plank that bridges over those abysses of self-annihilation and nonentity which are worse than death.

and bustle after my long retirement would be disagreeable to me. Yet if I could be of use either to your father or your family, I would venture the shortening of the insignificant days of your affectionate mother." Still later she writes to Sir James Stewart, "I confess that though I am (it may be) beyond the strict bounds of reason pleased with my Lord Bute's and my daughter's prosperity, I am doubtful whether I will attempt to be a spectator of it. I have so many years indulged my natural inclinations to solitude and reading, I am unwilling to We will give a last sketch of this indomit- return to crowds and bustle, which would able old woman in her own words, as address-be unavoidable in London." But her hused to the friends of her old age, Sir James and Lady Frances Stewart, to whom, when nearly seventy, she addresses letters as full of playful wit and cordial friendship as if her faculties had been at their freshest, and in whose behalf she employs what interest she has with her son-in-law Lord Bute, then in full favour with the young King George III.:

band's death seems to have decided the step which she thus regarded, and in the beginning of 1762 she had reached her native country. Walpole once more comes in at this point with the only description we have of the ancient beauty, now seventytwo, and in very broken health. He had sent her a copy of his book, Royal and Noble Authors. Notwithstanding his con

temptuous comments on her, he had been "wonderfully civil," she herself tells us, in Florence, and hastened to pay his respects on her arrival in London, but yet he cannot resist the temptation of making another ill-natured sketch of her:

"I went last night to visit, her," writes Hor"I give you my honour, and you who know her will believe me without it, the follow

ace.

lodged,' she said; 'I have two very decent closets and a cupboard on each floor. This served to laugh at, but could not be a pleasant exchange for the Italian palazzo." She came with her old prepossessions and enmities to a new world, in which her daughter had taken a new place of her own, and into which a new generation had grown up. But for that same daughter- no longer her ing is a faithful description: I found her in a had been, as she says, her passion, but "little damsel in white," the girl whose life little miserable bedchamber of a ready-furnished house, with two tallow candles and a bureau Lord Bute's wife, and mother of nine or ten covered with pots and pans. On her head, in children, each one of whom, doubtless, was full of all accounts, she had an old black-laced of much more consequence to her than her hood wrapped entirely round so as to conceal mother-Lady Mary must have felt herself all hair or want of hair; no handkerchief, but more utterly a stranger than among the palinstead of it a kind of horseman's riding-coat, aces of Venice or the rural byways of Loucalling itself a pet-en-l'air, made of a dark-vere. She brought her death with her to green brocade, with coloured and silver flowers, her native country in the most terrible shape and lined with furs; bodice laced; a full dimity that death can come. A secret cancer, like petticoat sprigged; velvet muffetees on her arms; grey stockings and slippers. Her face less changed in twenty years than I could have imagined. I told her so, and she was not so tolerable twenty years ago that she should have taken it for flattery; but she did, and literally gave me a box on the ear. She is very lively, all her senses perfect, her language as imperfect as ever, her avarice greater. She entertained me at first with nothing but the cheapness of the provisions at Helvoet. With nothing but an Italian, a French, and a Prussian, all men-servants, and something she calls an old secretary, but whose age, till he appears, will be doubtful, she has travelled everywhere. She receives all the world who go to homage her as queen-mother,

and crams them into this kennel."

the fabled fox that gnawed the Spartan's
vitals, had been undermining her health for
some time, and in ten months after her re-
turn to England, Lady Mary died.
the last act in it being the least tragic, the
Thus the tragedy ended like all tragedies,
least sorrowful of all. This woman of the
world, too, had her speechless weight upon
her, her burden patiently borne. She car-
ried it heroically, without a word, trying
ever with supreme valour to conceal it from
herself, and refuse to herself the sad luxury
of brooding over it. It is with a sigh of
relief that we turn from this as from so many
other graves. The labouring man had gone
out to his toil and labour till the evening;
and now the soft night, wrapping all griefs
in its darkness and stillness, weeping all
nameless agonies with its mild dews, had
come.

Yet Horace was one of the first to visit her, and the most ready to flatter, though he could not deny himself even here the monstrous insinuations about the old secretary of a woman of seventy-two! dislike There is little to be said about Lady Mary evidently rendering him blind. "Those Wortley's writings. Her life and soul and who could remember her arrival," writes curious personality live in her letters. In Lady Louisa Stuart, on the other hand, her verses there is only the artificial reflex "spoke with delight of the clearness, viva- of an age and style of the highest artificialcity, and raciness of her conversation, and ity, with sparkles of wit, no doubt, and full the youthful vigour which seemed to ani- of the wonderful clearness of a keen-eyed, mate her mind. She did not appear dis- quick, observing woman of the world. But pleased at the general curiosity to see her, she too, like most other persons with whom nor void of curiosity herself concerning the one comes in contact in the long vistas of rew things and people that her native coun- history, is in herself more interesting, more try presented to her view after so long an curious, a thousand times closer to us, than absence. I am most handsomely any of her works.

CHAPTER LII.

ISCHIA.

far advanced in life, but with a vigour in his look and a quick intelligence in his eye that showed what energy he must have possessed in youth. He had spent years at the galleys, but neither time nor the degradation of his associations had completely eradicated the traces of something above the common in his appearance; for No. 97

THE sun had just sunk below the horizon, and a blaze of blended crimson and gold spread over the Bay of Naples, colouring the rocky island of Ischia till it glowed like a carbuncle. Gradually, however, the rich warm tints began to fade away from the he had no other name as a prisonerbase of the mountains, and a cold blue colour stole slowly up their sides, peak after peak surrendering their gorgeous panoply, till at length the whole island assumed a hue blue as the sea it stood in.

But for the memory of the former glory it would have been difficult to imagine a more beautiful picture. Every cliff and jutting promontory tufted with wild olives and myrtle was reflected in the waveless sea below; and feathery palm-trees and broadleaved figs trembled in the water, as that gentle wash eddied softly round the rocks, or played on the golden shore.

It was essentially the hour of peace and repose. Along the shores of the bay, in every little village, the angelus was ringing, and kneeling groups were bowed in prayer; and even here, on this rocky islet, where crime and wretchedness were sent to expiate by years of misery their sins against their fellow-men, the poor galley-slaves caught one instant of kindred with the world, and were suffered to taste in peace the beauty of the hour. There they were in little knots and groups - some lying listlessly in the deep grass; some gathered on a little. rocky point, watching the fish as they darted to and fro in the limpid water, and doubtless envying their glorious freedom; and others, again, seated under some spreading tree, and seeming, at least, to feel the calm influence of the hour.

The soldiers who formed their guard had piled their arms, leaving here and there merely a sentinel, and had gone down amongst the rocks to search for limpets, or those rugged ricci di mare which humble palates accept as delicacies. A few, too, dashed in for a swim, and their joyous voices and merry laughter were heard amid the plash of the water they disported in.

In a small cleft of a rock overshadowed by an old ilex-tree, two men sat moodily gazing upon the sea. In dress they were indeed alike, for both wore that terrible green and yellow livery that marks a lifelong condemnation, and each carried the heavy chain of the same terrible sentence. They were linked together at the ankle, and thus, for convenience sake, they sat shoulder to shoulder. One was a thin, spare, but still wiry-looking man, evidently

had been condemned for his share in a plot
against the life of the king, three of his as-
sociates having been beheaded for their
greater criminality. What station he might
originally have belonged to was no longer
easy to determine; but there were yet some
signs that indicated that he had been at
least in the middle rank of life. His com-
panion was unlike him in every way. He
was a young man, with fresh complexion
and large blue eyes, the very type of frank-
ness and good-nature. Not even prison
diet and discipline had yet hollowed his
cheek, though it was easy to see that unac-
customed labour and distasteful food were
beginning to tell upon his strength, and the
bitter smile with which he was gazing on
his lank figure and wasted hands showed
the wearing misery that was consuming him.
Well, old Nick," said the young man,
at length, "this is to be our last evening
together; and if I ever should touch land
again, is there any way I could help you-
is there anything I could do for you?"

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"So then you're determined to try it?" said the other, in a low growling tone.

66

That I am. I have not spent weeks filing through that confounded chain for nothing; one wrench now, and it's smashed." "And then?" asked the old man, with a grin.

66

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And then I'll have a swim for it. I know all that-I know it all," said he, answering a gesture of the other's hand; but do you think I care to drag out such a life as this?"

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"I do," was the quiet reply.

"Then why you do is clear and clean beyond me. To me it is worse than fifty deaths."

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Look here, lad," said the old man, with a degree of animation he had not shown before. "There are four hundred and eighty of us here; some for ten, some for twenty years, some for life; except yourself alone, there is not one has the faintest chance of a pardon. You are English, and your nation takes trouble about its people, and, right or wrong, in the end gets them favourable treatment, and yet you are the only man here who would put his life in jeopardy on so poor a chance."

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I'll try it, for all that."

"Did you ever hear of a man that es-els, or papers of value somewhere near. caped by swimming?"