. With Swift we get both. Seldom has any collection
shown us more varied interests. But through it all there is an
anticipation of the knell of this commerce of his--"Only a woman's
hair"--and that hair threads, in subtle fashion, the whole of the
Journal, turning the panorama to something felt as well as seen, and
the puppet-show to realities of flesh and blood.

That this magical transforming element is wanting in a most remarkable
pair of contemporaries, Chesterfield and "Lady Mary," has been generally
allowed; though a strong fight has been made by some of her sisters for
"my lady" and though the soundest criticism allows that "my lord" did
not so much lack as dissemble heart and even sometimes showed the heart
he had. It would be out of our proper line to discuss such questions
here at any length. It may be enough to warn readers who have not yet
had time to look into the matter for themselves that Pope's coarse
attacks on Lady Mary and Johnson's fine rhetorical rebuff of
Chesterfield were unquestionably outbursts of hurt personal pride.
Horace Walpole made hits at both for reasons which we may call personal
at second-hand, because the one was a friend of his sister-in-law and
the other an enemy of his father. As for Dickens' caricature of "Sir
John Chester" in _Barnaby Rudge_ it is not so much a caricature as a
sheer and inexcusable libel. Anyhow, the letters of the Earl and the
Lady are exceedingly good reading. Persons of no advanced years who have
been introduced to them in the twentieth century have been known to find
them positively captivating: and their attractions are, not merely as
between the two but even in each case by itself, singularly various.
Lady Mary's forte--perhaps in direct following of her great forerunner
and part namesake, Marie de Sevigne, though she spoke inadvisedly of
her--lies in description of places and manners, and in literary
criticism.[14] Her accounts of her Turkish journey in earlier days, and
of some scenes in Italy later, of her court and other experiences, etc.,
rank among the best things of the kind in English; and her critical
acuteness, assisted as it was by no small possession of what might
almost be called scholarship, was most remarkable for her time. Also,
she does all these things naturally--with that naturalness at
which--when they possess it at all--women are so much better than men.
People say a lady can never pass a glass without looking at herself.
(One thinks by