er, and in the estimation
of men succeeding her lord. The noble graces of Lucy Hutchinson, I say,
may well make us marvel at the downfall following--at Goldsmith's
invention of the women of "The Vicar or Wakefield" in one age, and at
Thackeray's invention of the women of "Esmond" in another.

Mrs. Hutchinson has little leisure for much praise of the natural beauty
of sky and landscape, but now and then in her work there appears an
abiding sense of the pleasantness of the rural world--in her day an
implicit feeling rather than an explicit. "The happiness of the soil and
air contribute all things that are necessary to the use or delight of
man's life." "He had an opportunity of conversing with her in those
pleasant walks which, at the sweet season of the spring, invited all the
neighbouring inhabitants to seek their joys." And she describes a dream
whereof the scene was in the green fields of Southwark. What an England
was hers! And what an English! A memorable vintage of our literature
and speech was granted in her day; we owe much to those who--as she
did--gathered it in.

MRS. DINGLEY

We cannot do her honour by her Christian name. {2} All we have to call
her by more tenderly is the mere D, the D that ties her to Stella, with
whom she made the two-in-one whom Swift loved "better a thousand times
than life, as hope saved." MD, without full stops, Swift writes it eight
times in a line for the pleasure of writing it. "MD sometimes means
Stella alone," says one of many editors. "The letters were written
nominally to Stella and Mrs. Dingley," says another, "but it does not
require to be said that it was really for Stella's sake alone that they
were penned." Not so. "MD" never stands for Stella alone. And the
editor does not yet live who shall persuade one honest reader, against
the word of Swift, that Swift loved Stella only, with an ordinary love,
and not, by a most delicate exception, Stella and Dingley, so joined that
they make the "she" and "her" of every letter. And this shall be a paper
of reparation to Mrs. Dingley.

No one else in literary history has been so defrauded of her honours. In
love "to divide is not to take away," as Shelley says; and Dingley's half
of the tender things said to MD is equal to any whole, and takes nothing
from the whole of Stella's half. But the sentimentalist has fought
against Mrs. Dingley from the outset. He has disliked her, shirked her,
misconceived her,