e was still a pretty woman, with a piquant,
neat-featured face; which does not seem to have done any justice to a
mind at once masculine and sensitive, nor to a heart capable of
benevolence--capable of strong attachments, and of bitter hatred.

Like Lady Hervey, she lived with her husband on well-bred terms: there
existed no quarrel between them; no avowed ground of coldness; it was
the icy boundary of frozen feeling that severed them; the sure and
lasting though polite destroyer of all bonds, indifference. Lady Mary
was full of repartee, of poetry, of anecdote, and was not averse to
admiration; but she was essentially a woman of common sense, of views
enlarged by travel, and of ostensibly good principles. A woman of
delicacy was not to be found in those days, any more than other
productions of the nineteenth century: a telegraphic message would have
been almost as startling to a courtly ear as the refusal of a fine lady
to suffer a _double entendre_. Lady Mary was above all scruples, and
Lord Hervey, who had lived too long with George II. and his queen to
have the moral sense in her perfection, liked her all the better for her
courage--her merry, indelicate jokes, and her putting things down by
their right names, on which Lady Mary plumed herself: she was what they
term in the north of England, 'Emancipated.' They formed an old
acquaintance with a confidential, if not a tender friendship; and that
their intimacy was unpleasant to Lady Hervey was proved by her
refusal--when, after the grave had closed over Lord Hervey, late in
life, Lady Mary ill, and broken down by age, returned to die in
England--to resume an acquaintance which had been a painful one to her.

Lord Hervey was a martyr to illness of an epileptic character; and Lady
Mary gave him her sympathy. She was somewhat of a doctor--and being
older than her friend, may have had the art of soothing sufferings,
which were the worse because they were concealed. Whilst he writhed in
pain, he was obliged to give vent to his agony by alleging that an
attack of cramp bent him double: yet he lived by rule--a rule harder to
adhere to than that of the most conscientious homoeopath in the
present day. In the midst of court gaieties and the duties of office, he
thus wrote to Dr. Cheyne:--

... 'To let you know that I continue one of your most pious votaries,
and to tell you the method I am in. In the first place, I never take
wine nor malt drink, nor any liquid but water an