as the daughter of a butcher of
Gloucester, and an extremely beautiful person. Mr. Henry Berkeley,
the fifth son of Lady Berkeley, for many years Member of Parliament
for Bristol, and as many years the persistent advocate of the system
of voting by ballot, travelled and resided for some time in America,
and formed a close intimacy with ----, who, when we came to England,
accepted Mr. Berkeley's invitation to visit his mother at Cranford,
and took me with him, to make the acquaintance of this remarkable
old lady. She was near eighty years old, tall and stately, with no
apparent infirmities, and great remains of beauty. There was great
originality in all she said, and her manner was strikingly energetic
for so old a woman. I remember, one day after dinner, she had her
glass filled with claret till the liquid appeared to form a rim
above the vessel that contained it, and, raising it steadily to her
lips, looked round the table, where sat all her children but Lord
Fitzhardinge, and saying, "God bless you all," she drank off the
contents without spilling a drop, and, replacing the glass on the
table, said, "Not one of my sons could do that."

One morning, when I was rather indisposed, and unable to join any of
the parties into which the guests had divided themselves on their
various quests after amusement, I was left alone with Lady Berkeley,
and she undertook to give me a sketch of her whole history; and very
strange it was. She gave me, of course, her own version of the
marriage story, and I could not but wonder whether she might have
persuaded herself into believing it true, when she wound up her
curious and interesting account of her life by saying, "And now I am
ready to be carried to my place in the vault, and my place in the
vault is ready for me" (she pointed to the church which adjoined the
old mansion); "and I have the key of it here," and she gave a hearty
slap upon her pocket. She told me of her presentation at Court, and
the uproar it occasioned among the great ladies there, whose
repugnance to admit her of their number she described with much
humor, but attributed solely to the fact of her plebeian descent, of
which she spoke unhesitatingly.

The impression I gathered from her narrative, rather unconsciously
on her part I suspect, was that the Queen, whose strictness upon t