last century. The class comes before us in
elegant and tasteful letters, indicative of minds imbued with
literature, though mayhap not ambitious of authorship, and that show
what ornaments their writers must have proved of the society to which
they belonged, and what delight they must have given to the circles in
which they more immediately moved. The Lady Russel, the Lady Luxborough,
the Countess of Pomfret, Mrs. Elizabeth Montague, &c. &c.,--names well
fixed in the epistolary literature of England, though unknown in the
walks of ordinary authorship--may be regarded as specimens of the class.
Even in the cases in which its members did become authoresses, and
produced songs and ballads instinct with genius, they seem to have had
but little of the author's ambition in them; and their songs, cast
carelessly upon the waters, have been found, after many days, preserved
rather by accident than design. The Lady Wardlaw, who produced the noble
ballad of "Hardyknute"--the Lady Ann Lindsay, who wrote "Auld Robin
Gray"--the Miss Blamire, whose "Nabob" is so charming a composition,
notwithstanding its unfortunately prosaic name--and the late Lady
Nairne, authoress of the "Land o' the Leal," "John Tod," and the "Laird
o' Cockpen"--are specimens of the class that fixed their names among the
poets with apparently as little effort or design as singing birds pour
forth their melodies.

The north had, in the last age, its interesting group of ladies of this
type, of whom the central figure might be regarded as the late Mrs.
Elizabeth Rose of Kilravock, the correspondent of Burns, and the cousin
and associate of Henry Mackenzie, the "Man of Feeling." Mrs. Rose seems
to have been a lady of a singularly fine mind--though a little touched,
mayhap, by the prevailing sentimentalism of the age. The Mistress of
Harley, Miss Walton, might have kept exactly such journals as hers; but
the talent which they exhibited was certainly of a high order; and the
feeling, though cast in a somewhat artificial mould, was, I doubt not,
sincere. Portions of these journals I had an opportunity of perusing
when on my visit to my friend Miss Dunbar; and there is a copy of one of
them now in my possession. Another member of this group was the late
Mrs. Grant of Laggan--at the time when it existed unbroken, the mistress
of a remote Highland manse, and known but to her personal friends by
those earlier letters which form the first half of her "Letters from the
Moun