took place at a very advanced age. She was strikingly handsome,
with a magnificent figure and great vivacity and charm of manner and
conversation. Her accomplishments were various, and all of so masterly
an excellence that her performances would have borne comparison with the
best works of professional artists. She drew admirably, especially
animals, of which she was extremely fond. I have seen drawings of groups
of cattle by her that, without the advantage of color, recall the life
and spirit of Rosa Bonheur's pictures. She was a perfect Italian
scholar, having studied enthusiastically that divine tongue with the
enthusiast Ugo Foscolo, whose patriotic exile and misfortunes were
cheered and soothed by the admiring friendship and cordial kindness of
Lord and Lady Dacre. Among all the specimens of translation with which I
am acquainted, her English version of Petrarch's sonnets is one of the
most remarkable for fidelity, beauty, and the grace and sweetness with
which she has achieved the difficult feat of following in English the
precise form of the complicated and peculiar Italian prosody. These
translations seem to me as nearly perfect as that species of literature
can be. But the most striking demonstrations of her genius were the
groups of horses which Lady Dacre modeled from nature, and which, copied
and multiplied in plaster casts, have been long familiar to the public,
without many of those who know and admire them being aware who was their
author. It is hardly possible to see anything more graceful and
spirited, truer at once to nature and the finest art, than these
compositions, faithful in the minutest details of execution, and highly
poetical in their entire conception. Lady Dacre was the finest female
rider and driver in England; that is saying, in the world. Had she lived
in Italy in the sixteenth century her name would be among the noted
names of that great artistic era; but as she was an Englishwoman of the
nineteenth, in spite of her intellectual culture and accomplishments she
was _only_ an exceedingly clever, amiable, kind lady of fashionable
London society.

Of Lord Dacre it is not easy to speak with all the praise which he
deserved. He inherited his title from his mother, who had married Mr.
Brand of the Hoo, Hertfordshire, and at the moment of his becoming heir
to that estate was on the point of leaving England with Colonel Talbot,
son of Lord Talbot de Malahide, to found with him a colony in British