attentive spectator in the theatre of life. But in her
letters she pretended to be, or supposed herself called upon to
seem, passionate and distracted. They are all twinkling with
humorous or petulant exaggeration. She happens to forget an
engagement, which was of no sort of importance, and this is how she
apologises:--

"To think that every hour since you said you would come I have
repeated to myself--Gosse at 5, Gosse at 5, and then after all to
go meandering off and leaving you to cuss and swear on the
doorstep, and you will never come again now, really. No punishment
here or hereafter will be too much for me. Lead me to the Red Hill
Asylum, and leave me there."

This was written nearly twenty years ago, and she was not less
vivacious until the end. Lord Lansdowne tells me of an anonymous
letter which he once received, to which she afterwards pleaded
guilty. A cow used to be kept at the back of Lansdowne House, and
the animal, no doubt feeling lonely, was in the habit of lowing at
all sorts of hours. The letter, which was supposed to voice the
complaint of the neighbours in Charles Street, was couched in the
broadest Wiltshire dialect, and ended with the postscript: "Dang
'un, there 'ee goes again!" As a matter of fact, her letters, about
which she had no species of vanity or self-consciousness, were to
her merely instruments of friendship. There was an odd mingling of
affection and stiffness in them. She marshalled her acquaintances
with them, and almost invariably they were concerned with
arrangements for meeting or explanations of absence. In my own
experience, I must add that she made an exception when her friends
were abroad, when she took considerable pains to tell them the
gossip, often in surprising terms. I was once regaled with her
experiences as the neighbour of a famous African magnate, and with
the remark, "Mrs. ----," a London fine lady of repute, "has been
here, and has scraped the whole inside out of Mr. ----, and gone
her way rejoicing." Nor did she spare the correspondent himself:--

"Old Dr. ---- has been here, and tells me he admires you very much;
but I believe he has lost his memory, and he never had good taste
at any time."

This was not a tribute which self-esteem could hug to its bosom. Of
a very notorious