y.
Few women in England ever mixed more actively in politics than Lady
Erpingham, or with more remarkable ability. Her friends were out of
office, it is true; but she saw the time approaching rapidly when their
opinions must come into power. She bad begun to love, for itself, the
scheming of political ambition, and in any country but England she
would have been a conspirator, and in old times might have risen to be
a queen; but as it was, she was only a proud, discontented woman. She
knew, too, that it was all she could be--all that her sex allowed her
to be--yet did she not the less straggle and toil on. The fate of her
father still haunted her; her promise and his death-bed still rose oft
and solemnly before leer; the humiliations she had known in her
early condition--the homage that had attended her later career--still
cherished in her haughty soul indignation at the faction he had
execrated, and little less of the mighty class which that faction
represented. The system of "fashion" she had so mainly contributed
to strengthen, and which was originally by her intended to build up a
standard of opinion, independent of mere rank, and in defiance of mere
wealth, she saw polluted and debased by the nature of its followers,
into a vulgar effrontery, which was worse than the more quiet dulness
it had attempted to supplant. Yet still she was comforted by the thought
that through this system lay the way to more wholesome changes. The
idols of rank and wealth once broken, she believed that a pure and sane
worship must ultimately be established. Doubtless in the old French
regime there were many women who thought like her, but there were none
who acted like her--deliberately, and with an end. What an excellent,
what a warning picture is contained in the entertaining Memoirs of Count
Segur! how admirably that agreeable gossip develops the state of
mind among the nobility of France!--"merry censurers of the old
customs"--"enchanted by the philosophy of Voltaire"--"ridiculing the old
system"--"embracing liberality as a fashion," and "gaily treading a soil
bedecked with flowers, which concealed a precipice from their view!"
In England, there are fewer flowers, and the precipice will be less
fearful.

A certain disappointment which had attended her marriage with Godolphin,
and the disdainful resentment she felt at the pleasures that allured him
from her, tended yet more to deepen at once her distaste for the habits
of a frivolous s