ghted their
readers; but those who had read Lord Bacon's Essays, and other writers,
such as Owen Feltham and Osborne, from whom these relics are chiefly
extracted, might have wondered that Bacon should have been so little
known to the families of the Nortons and the Gethins, to whom her
ladyship was allied; to Congreve and to the editor; and still more
particularly to subsequent compilers, as Ballard in his Memoirs, and
lately the Rev. Mark Noble in his Continuation of Granger; who both,
with all the innocence of Criticism, give specimens of these "Relics,"
without a suspicion that they were transcribing literally from Lord
Bacon's Essays! Unquestionably Lady Gethin herself intended no
imposture; her mind had all the delicacy of her sex; she noted much from
the books she seems most to have delighted in; and nothing less than the
most undiscerning friends could have imagined that everything written by
the hand of this young lady was her "first conceptions;" and _apologise_
for some of the finest thoughts, in the most vigorous style which the
English language can produce. It seems, however, to prove that Lord
Bacon's Essays were not much read at the time this volume appeared.

The marble book in Westminster Abbey must, therefore, lose most of its
leaves; but it was necessary to discover the origin of this miraculous
production of a young lady. What is Lady Gethin's, or what is not hers,
in this miscellany of plagiarisms, it is not material to examine. Those
passages in which her ladyship speaks in her own person probably are of
original growth; of this kind many evince great vivacity of thought,
drawn from actual observation on what was passing around her; but even
among these are intermixed the splendid passages of Bacon and other
writers.

I shall not crowd my pages with specimens of a very suspicious author.
One of her subjects has attracted my attention; for it shows the corrupt
manners of persons of fashion who lived between 1680 and 1700. To find a
mind so pure and elevated as Lady Gethin's unquestionably was,
discussing whether it were most advisable to have for a husband a
general lover, or one attached to a mistress, and deciding by the force
of reasoning in favour of the dissipated man (for a woman, it seems, had
only the alternative), evinces a public depravation of morals. These
manners were the wretched remains of the court of Charles the Second,
when Wycherley, Dryden, and Congreve seem to have written with