In fine, women receive no religious education; they seldom, if ever, pray; and their heaven, if they have one, is some second-hand sort of paradise, very different from that of their husbands-unless, as I have observed, 'by particular desire.'

Nothing can be more hideous than the Arab woman of the street; nothing more picturesque than her of the hareem. The former presents a mass of white, shroudlike drapery, waddling along on a pair of enormous yellow boots, with one brilliant eye gleaming above the veil which is drawn across the face. The lower classes wear only a very loose, long blue frock, and appear anxious to conceal nothing except their faces, in which they consider that identity alone consists. As these women cannot spare the hands to the exclusive use of their veils, they wear a sort of snout, or long, black, tapering veil, bound over the cheek-bones, and supported from the forehead by a string of beads.

Take one of these, an ugly, old, sun-scorched hag, with a skin like a hippopotamus and a veil-snout like an elephant's trunk; her scanty robe scarcely serving the purposes of a girdle; her hands, feet, and forehead tattooed of a smoke-colour; and there is scarcely a more hideous spectacle on earth. But the Lady of the Hareem, on the other hand-couched gracefully on a rich Persian carpet strewn with soft pillowy cushionsis as rich a picture as admiration ever gazed on. Her eyes, if not as dangerous to the heart as those of our country, where the sunshine of intellect gleams through a heaven of blue, are nevertheless perfect in their kind, and at least as dangerous to the senses. Languid, yet full-brimful of life; dark, yet very lustrous; liquid, yet clear as stars, they are compared by their poets to the shape of the almond and the bright timidness of the gazelle's. The face is delicately oval, and its shape is set off by the gold-fringed turban, the most becoming head-dress in the world; the long, black, silken tresses are braided from the forehead, and hang wavily on each side of the face, falling behind in a glossy cataract, that sparkles with such golden drops as might have glittered upon Danaë after the Olympian shower. A light tunic of pink or pale blue crape is covered with a long silk robe, open at the bosom, and buttoned thence downward to the delicately slippered little feet, that peep daintily from beneath the full silken trousers. Round the loins, rather than the waist, a cachemire shawl is loosely wrapt as a girdle; and an embroidered jacket or a large silk robe with loose open sleeves completes the costume. Nor is the fragrant water pipe, with its long variegated serpent and its jewelled mouthpiece, any detraction from the portrait.

Picture to yourself one of Eve's brightest daughters in Eve's own loving land. The woman-dealer has found among the mountains that perfection in a living form which Praxiteles scarcely realised when inspired fancy wrought out its ideal in marble. Silken scarfs, as richly coloured and as airy as the rainbow, wreathe her round, from the snowy brow to the finely rounded limbs, half buried in billowy cushions: the attitude is the very poetry of repose-languid it may be; but glowing life thrills beneath that flower-soft exterior, from the varying cheek and flashing eye to the henna-dyed, taper fingers that capriciously play with her rosary of beads. The blaze of sunshine is round her kiosk, but she sits in the softened shadow so dear to the painter's eye. And so she dreams away the warm hours in such a calm of

thought within, and sight or sound without, that she starts when the gold-fish gleams in the fountain or the breeze-ruffled roses shed a leaf upon her bosom.

The mystery, the seclusion, and the danger that surround the Odalisque may be perilously interesting to the romantic; but to matter-of-fact people like myself an English fireside, a Scottish mountain, or an Irish glen has more attractions in this respect than any Zenana in Arabia; and the women who inhabit them, with purity in the heart and intellect on the brow, and a cottage-bonnet on the head, are better worth risking life (nay, liberty) for than all the turbaned voluptuous beauty of the East. (From The Crescent and the Cross.)

Frances Trollope (1780-1863) was born at Stapleton, Bristol (the birthplace also of Hannah More), but brought up at Heckfield vicarage, North Hampshire. In 1809 she married Thomas Anthony Trollope, barrister and Fellow of New College, Oxford; in 1827, on his falling into the direst embarrassment, she went out to Cincinnati with her second boy and her two little girls. There was a scheme for starting a European fancy bazaar there, which swallowed up £2000, but ended in absolute ruin; her three years' residence and travels in the States bore fruit, however, in her Domestic Manners of the Americans. It appeared in 1832, when its author was over fifty, and at once excited attention. She drew so uncomplimentary a picture of American ways and American faults and foibles that the whole republic was-not without reason, for her representations, even when based on fact, were grossly overcharged-incensed at their English satirist. A novel, The Refugee in America, published in the same year, had much in common with the earlier work, and showed little art in the construction of the fable. Mrs Trollope now tried new ground. In 1833 she published The Abbess, a novel; and in 1834 a book on Belgium and Western Germany, countries where she travelled in better humour, the most serious grievance she had against Germany being the tobacco-smoke, which she vituperates with unwearied perseverIn 1836 she renewed her war with the Americans in The Adventures of Jonathan Jeffer son Whitiaw, in which she gives touching pictures of the miseries of the coloured population of the Southern States. Paris and the Parisians belongs to the same year. The Vicar of Wrexhill (1837), The Widow Barnaby (1839), and its sequel The Widow Married (1840) are among her best novels, and contain amusing sketches of manners and eccentricities. Vienna and the Austrians (1838) was of the same cast as Belgium and Germany, but unhappily showed much more unreasonable prejudice. Between 1838 and 1843 Mrs Trollope threw off seven or eight novels and an account of a Visit to Italy. Her smart caustic style was not so well suited for sketching classic scenes and the antiquities of Italy as for satirising the eccentricities of national life and character, and this work was hardly so successful as her previous publications. Her later books are decidedly

ance.

inferior: the old characters are reproduced, and coarseness is too often substituted for strength. Her husband having died near Bruges in 1835, she settled in Florence in 1843, and here she died in the eighty-fourth year of her age. She published in all a hundred and fifteen volumes, of which twelve were travels and the remainder novels.

Mrs Trollope was an acute and observant writer, but was overweeningly and self-complacently English, cherishing a profound belief in the inestimable blessings of the British constitution, of the English Church, and English culture generally, with an equally frank abhorrence of the manifest and inevitable consequences of democracy. She constantly returns to her maxim that commonsense revolts at the mischievous sophistry of the false and futile axiom, due, she believes, to her bête noire Jefferson, that all men are born free and equal.' She admits that many of her remarks apply to the Wild West rather than to the long-settled States; but the eccentricities of the pioneers in the Mississippi valley coloured her judgments of Washington and New York. She does not approve of slavery: 'I conceive it to be essentially wrong; but so far as my observation has extended, I think its influence is far less injurious to the manners and morals of the people than the fallacious ideas of equality which are so fondly cherished by the workingclasses of the white population of America.' And nothing excited her 'horror and disgust' so much as what she saw of revivals and camp meetings. The dialect she makes her Americans speak, though it abounds with admitted Americanisms, seems even to an English eye impossible; and while her observations are, to say the least, highly coloured, many of the stories she reports as having reached her about the enormities of representative Americans are quite incredible. No doubt she did note a vast number of things deserving amendment; but the most convinced Tory cannot believe she saw so little worth commendation, and would disapprove the sneering and censorious tone in which many of her tales are told.

The Fourth of July.

To me the dreary coldness and want of enthusiasm in American manner is one of their greatest defects, and I therefore hailed the demonstrations of general feeling which this day elicits with real pleasure. On the 4th

of July the hearts of the people seem to awaken from a three hundred and sixty-four days' sleep; they appear high-spirited, gay, animated, social, generous, or at least liberal in expense; and would they but refrain from spitting on that hallowed day, I should say that, on the 4th of July at least, they appeared to be an amiable people. It is true that the women have but little to do with the pageantry, the splendour, or the gaiety of the day; but, setting this defect aside, it was indeed a glorious sight to behold a jubilee so heartfelt as this; and had they not the bad taste and bad feeling to utter an annual oration with unvarying abuse of the mothercountry, to say nothing of the warlike manifesto called

the Declaration of Independence, our gracious king himself might look upon the scene and say that it was good; nay, even rejoice that twelve millions of bustling bodies, at four thousand miles distance from his throne and his altars, should make their own laws and drink their own tea after the fashion that pleased them best.

American Freedom.

Cuyp's clearest landscapes have an atmosphere that approaches nearer to that of America than any I remember on canvas; but even Cuyp's air cannot reach the lungs, and therefore can only give an idea of half the enjoyment; for it makes itself felt as well as seen, and is indeed a constant source of pleasure.

Our walks were, however, curtailed in several directions by my old Cincinnati enemies, the pigs; immense droves of them were continually arriving from the country by the road that led to most of our favourite walks; they were often fed and lodged in the prettiest valleys, and worse still, were slaughtered beside the prettiest streams. Another evil threatened us from the same quarter that was yet heavier. Our cottage had an ample piazza (a luxury almost universal in the country houses of America), which, shaded by a group of acacias, made a delightful sitting-room; from this favourite spot we one day perceived symptoms of building in a field close to it; with much anxiety we hastened to the spot, and asked what building was to be erected there.

"Tis to be a slaughter-house for hogs,' was the dreadful reply. As there were several gentlemen's houses in the neighbourhood, I asked if such an erection might not be indicted as a nuisance.

'A what?'

'A nuisance,' I repeated, and explained what I

meant.

'No, no,' was the reply; 'that may do very well for your tyrannical country, where a rich man's nose is more thought of than a poor man's mouth; but hogs be profitable produce here, and we be too free for such a law as that, I guess.'

During my residence in America little circumstances like the foregoing often recalled to my mind a conversation I once held in France with an old gentleman on the subject of their active police and its omnipresent gens-d'armerie; 'Croyez moi, Madame, il n'y a que ceux à qui ils ont à faire qui les trouvent de trop.' And the old gentleman was right, not only in speaking of France, but of the whole human family, as philosophers call us. The well disposed, those whose own feeling of justice would prevent their annoying others, will never complain of the restraints of the law. All the freedom enjoyed in America, beyond what is enjoyed in England, is enjoyed solely by the disorderly at the expense of the orderly; and were I a stout knight, either of the sword or of the pen, I would fearlessly throw down my gauntlet, and challenge the whole republic to prove the contrary; but, being as I am, a feeble looker-on, with a needle for my spear and 'I talk' for my device, I must be contented with the power of stating the fact, perfectly certain that I shall be contradicted by one loud shout from Maine to Georgia.

On a Mississippi Steamer.

The total want of all the usual courtesies of the table; the voracious rapidity with which the viands were seized and devoured; the strange uncouth phrases and

pronunciation; the loathsome spitting, from the contamination of which it was absolutely impossible to protect our dresses; the frightful manner of feeding with their knives, till the whole blade seemed to enter into the mouth; and the still more frightful manner of cleaning the teeth afterwards with a pocket-knife, soon forced us to feel that we were not surrounded by the generals, colonels, and majors of the Old World, and that the dinner-hour was to be anything rather than an hour of enjoyment.

Her sons, Anthony and Thomas Adolphus Trollope, are elsewhere noticed. See Frances Trollope (2 vols. 1895), by Frances Eleanor Trollope, the second wife of Thomas Adolphus, and herself a novelist.

The Countess of Blessington (1789-1849), long known in the world of fashion and light literature, was born at Knockbrit near Clonmel. Her father, Edmund Power, was an Irish 'squireen,' who forced his daughter, when only fourteen, into a marriage with a drunken Captain Farmer. The marriage was unhappy; Marguerite soon left her husband, who was killed in 1817 by a fall from a window. Four months later she was promoted from mistress to be countess of an Irish peer, Charles Gardiner, Earl of Blessington. Her acquired rank, her beauty, and literary tastes now rendered her the centre of a brilliant circle, and she revelled in every species of extravagant display. In 1822 the pair set out on a Continental tour. They visited Byron in Genoa; and Lady Blessington's Conversations with Lord Byron (1834; new ed. 1894) present on the whole a faithful-though inevitably incomplete-picture of the noble and then notorious poet. In May 1829 Lady Blessington was again left a widow-this time with a jointure of about £2000 a year. A daughter of the deceased earl, by a former marriage, became the wife of Count Alfred d'Orsay, the famous dandy of the day. This marriage also proved unfortunate; the pair separated, and while Madame d'Orsay remained in Paris, the count accompanied Lady Blessington to England. This close association, broken only by death, gave rise to scandalous rumours, yet the countess and her friend maintained a conspicuous place in society. D'Orsay, accomplished both as painter and sculptor, was the acknowledged leader of fashion; but a career of gaiety and splendour soon involved the countess in debt. She made a considerable income by writing, yet her expenditure greatly exceeded her resources. Her first novel, Grace Cassidy, or the Repealer, appeared in 1833, and was followed by nearly a dozen others, including Strathern's Life at Home and Abroad (1843) and Marmaduke Herbert (1847). There were also tales in verse and innumerable contributions to magazines and annuals. Perhaps Lady Blessington's best book was her Idler in Italy; but she was better known as the editor for years of the annual Book of Beauty and The Keepsake. Finally D'Orsay had to flee to the Continent (April 1849), and the countess followed, having broken up her establishment in Gore House, Kensington; every

thing was sold off, and Lady Blessington and D'Orsay settled in Paris, where she died the same year, while the count survived her just three years. The friendliest—perhaps the truest-estimate of this brilliant creature is given in the epitaph written for her tomb by Barry Cornwall: In her lifetime she was loved and admired for her many graceful writings, her gentle manners, her kind and generous heart. Men famous for art and science in distant lands sought her friendship; and the historians and scholars, the poets and wits and painters, of her own country found an unfailing welcome in her ever-hospitable home. She gave cheerfully, to all who were in need, help and sympathy, and useful counsel; and she died lamented by many friends. Those who loved her best in life, and now lament her most, have reared this tributary marble over the place of her rest.' Her Life has been written by Madden (3 vols. 1855) and Molloy (1896). Her poems were verses at most, often not quite that; in a collection of her Marims, Thoughts, and Reflections, separately published in 1839, these are as characteristic as any :

Deceivers.

We are born to deceive or to be deceived. In one of these classes we must be numbered; but our self-respect is dependent upon our selection. The practice of decep tion generally secures its own punishment; for callous indeed must be that mind which is insensible to its ignominy! But he who has been duped is conscious, even in the very moment that he detects the imposition, of his proud superiority to one who can stoop to the adoption of so foul and sorry a course. The really good and high-minded, therefore, are seldom provoked by the discovery of deception; though the cunning and artful resent it as a humiliating triumph obtained over them in their own vocations.

Society.

'Be prosperous and happy, never require our services, and we will remain your friends.' This is not what society says, but it is the principle on which it acts.

The Poetry of Life.

The poetry of our lives is, like our religion, kept apart from our every-day thoughts: neither influence us as they ought. We should be wiser and happier if, instead of secluding them in some secret shrine in our hearts, we suffered their humanising qualities to temper our habitual words and actions.

Virtue.

Horne Tooke said of intellectual philosophy that he had become better acquainted with it, as with the country, through having sometimes lost his way. May not the same be said of virtue? for never is it so truly known or appreciated as by those who, having strayed from its path, have at length regained it.

Infirmities of Genius.

The infirmities of genius are often mistaken for its privileges.

Love.

Love in France is a comedy, in England a tragedy, in Italy an opera seria, and in Germany a melodrame.

Mrs Bray, born Anne Eliza Kempe (17901883), a Londoner, was intended for the stage, but in 1818 married Stothard the artist, who died in 1821. In 1825 she married the Rev. E. A. Bray, vicar of Tavistock; and after his death in 1857 she settled in London. Between 1820 and 1874 she published a score of romances, books of travel, and other works, the best being The Borders of the Tamar and the Tavy (1836; 2nd ed. 1879), the Life of Thomas Stothard, R.A. (1851), and A Prep at the Pixies (1854). Her Autobiography and also a twelve-volume edition of her romances were published in 1884.

Catherine Grace Frances Gore (17991861) was born the daughter of Charles Moody, a wine-merchant at East Retford in Nottingham. She was already known as a poetess when in 1823 she married Captain Charles Arthur Gore of the Life Guards. She was able to support her family by her voluminous literary labours; and she continued to supply the circulating libraries with one or two novels a year till, quite blind, she after 1850 retired from work and from society, having produced some two hundred volumes of novels and shorter tales, with comedies and poems. Her first publications were two or three volumes of poems; her first novel, Theresa Marchmont, was published in 1823; the two tales, The Lettre de Cachet and The Reign of Terror-one of the times of Louis XIV., and the other of the French Revolution- in 1827. Next appeared a series of Hungarian Tales. Women as they Are, or the Manners of the Day (3 vols. 1830), was an easy, sparkling tale of modern society, with much lady-like writing on dress and fashion, and some rather misplaced contempt for 'excellent wives' and' good sort of men.' Pictures of gay life-balls, dinners, and fêtes-with clever sketches of character and amusing dialogues, make up the three volumes of Mothers and Daughters 1831). The Fair of May Fair (1832) was hardly so well received; and thereafter the authoress lived in France for some years. Mrs Armytage appeared in 1836; and in the next years (1837–38) Mary Raymond, Memoirs of a Peeress, The Heir of Selwood, and The Book of Roses, or Rose-fancier's Manual, a delightful little work on the history of the rose, its propagation and culture, based on Mrs Gore's knowledge of French gardening. Cecil, or the Adventures of a Coxcomb (1841), and The Banker's Wife (1843) are among her more notable works. She had seen much of the world both at home and abroad, and was never at a loss for character or incident. The worst of her works must be pronounced clever; their interest consists in their lively and caustic pictures of fashionable society; but the want of passion and simplicity in her living models, and the endless frivolities of their occupations--though not unknown in modern fashionable novels-usually weary and repel readers nowadays. Thackeray caricatured her manner in one of the 'Novels by Eminent Hands.'

A Worldly Lady.

Lady Lilfield was a thoroughly worldly woman—a worthy scion of the Mordaunt stock. She had professedly accepted the hand of Sir Robert because a connection with him was the best that happened to present itself in the first year of her début-the 'best match' to be had at a season's warning! She knew that she had been brought out with the view to dancing at a certain number of balls, refusing a certain number of good offers, and accepting a better one, somewhere between the months of January and June; and she regarded it as a propitious dispensation of Providence to her parents and to herself that the comparative proved a superlative- even a high-sheriff of the county, a baronet of respectable date, with ten thousand a year! She felt that her duty towards herself necessitated an immediate acceptance of the dullest 'good sort of man' extant throughout the three kingdoms; and the whole routine of her after-life was regulated by the same rigid code of moral selfishness. She was penetrated with a most exact sense of what was due to her position in the world; but she was equally precise in her appreciation of all that, in her turn, she owed to society; nor, from her youth upwards-' Content to dwell in decencies for ever' --had she been detected in the slightest infraction of these minor social duties. She knew with the utmost accuracy of domestic arithmetic, to the fraction of a course or an entrée, the number of dinners which Beech Park was indebted to its neighbourhood-the complement of laundry-maids indispensable to the maintenance of its county dignity-the aggregate of pines by which it must retain its horticultural precedence. She had never retarded by a day or an hour the arrival of the family-coach in Grosvenor Square at the exact moment creditable to Sir Robert's senatorial punctuality, nor procrastinated by half-a-second the simultaneous bobs of her ostentatious Sunday-school as she sailed majestically along the aisle towards her tall, stately, pharisaical, squire-archical pew. True to the execution of her tasks -and her whole life was but one laborious task-true and exact as the great bell of the Beech Park turretclock, she was enchanted with the monotonous music of her own cold iron tongue; proclaiming herself the best of wives and mothers because Sir Robert's rent-roll could afford to command the services of a first-rate steward and butler and housekeeper, and thus ensure a well-ordered household; and because her seven substantial children were duly drilled through a daily portion of rice pudding and spelling-book, and an annual distribution of mumps and measles! All went well at Beech Park; for Lady Lilfield was 'the excellent wife' of a good sort of man'!

So bright an example of domestic merit-and what country neighbourhood cannot boast of its duplicate?— was naturally superior to seeking its pleasures in the vapid and varying novelties of modern fashion. The habits of Beech Park still affected the dignified and primeval purity of the departed century. Lady Lilfield remained true to her annual eight rural months of the county of Durham, against whose claims Kemp Town pleaded, and Spa and Baden bubbled in vain. During her pastoral seclusion, by a careful distribution of her stores of gossiping, she contrived to prose, in undetected tautology, to successive detachments of an extensive neighbourhood, concerning her London importance, her court-dress, her dinner-parties, and her refusal to

visit the Duchess of ; while, during the reign of her London importance, she made it equally her duty to bore her select visiting list with the history of the new Beech Park school-house, of the Beech Park double dahlias, and of the Beech Park privilege of uniting, in an aristocratic dinner-party, the abhorrent heads of the rival political factions-the Bianchi e Neri-the houses of Montague and Capulet of the county palatine of Durham. By such minute sections of the wide chapter of colloquial boredom, Lady Lilfield acquired the character of being a very charming woman throughout her respectable clan of dinner-giving baronets and their wives, but the reputation of a very miracle of prosiness among those 'Men of the world who know the world like men.' She was but a weed in the nobler field of society. (From Women as they Are.) London Life.

A squirrel in a cage, which pursues its monotonous round from summer to summer, as though it had forgotten the gay green-wood and glorious air of liberty, is not condemned to a more monotonous existence than the fashionable world in the unvarying routine of its amusements; and when a London beauty expands into ecstasies concerning the delights of London to some country neighbour on a foggy autumn day, vaguely alluding to the 'countless' pleasures and diversified ' amusements of London, the country neighbour may be assured that the truth is not in her. Nothing can be more minutely monotonous than the recreations of the really fashionable; monotony being, in fact, essential to that distinction. Tigers may amuse themselves in a thousand irregular diverting ways; but the career of a genuine exclusive is one to which a mill-horse would scarcely look for relief. London houses, London establishments, are formed after the same unvarying model. At the fifty or sixty balls to which she is to be indebted for the excitement of her season, the fine lady listens to the same band, is refreshed from a buffet prepared by the same skill, looks at the same diamonds, hears the same trivial observations; and but for an incident or two, the growth of her own follies, might find it difficult to point out the slightest difference between the fête of the countess on the first of June and that of the marquis on the first of July. But though twenty seasons' experience of these desolating facts might be expected to damp the ardour of certain dowagers and dandies who are to be found hurrying along the golden railroad year after year, it is not wonderful that the young girls their daughters should be easily allured from their dull schoolrooms by fallacious promises of pleasure.

(From Women as they Are.) Catherine Crowe (1800-76), born Stevens at Borough Green in Kent, in 1822 married Lieut.Colonel Crowe, and spent great part of her afterlife in Edinburgh, where she came under George Combe's influence. Her mind was morbid and despondent, ever hovering on the border-line of insanity, which it crossed once in one violent but brief attack. Her translation of Kerner's Seeress of Prevorst (1845) prepared the way for her wellknown Night-side of Nature (1848), a collection of well-told stories of the supernatural by an uncritical believer. She wrote also tragedies, juvenile books, and novels-the best Susan Hopley (1841) and Lilly Dawson (1847).

Mrs S. C. Hall (1800-81) was born in Dublin and brought up at Wexford, though on her mother's side she was of Swiss descent. Her maiden name, Anna Maria Fielding, was unknown in the literary world; her first work was not published till after her marriage to Samuel Carter Hall in 1824. At fifteen she had come with her mother to England, and it was some time before she revisited her native country; but the scenes which were familiar to her as a child had made such a vivid and lasting impression on her mind, and all her sketches showed so much freshness and vigour, that her readers might well imagine she had spent her life among the scenes she describes. To her early absence from her native country is partly at least to be traced one noteworthy characteristic of all her writings-the absence of party feeling on politics or religion. Mrs Hall's Sketches of Irish Character (1828) are much liker Miss Mitford's tales than they are to the Irish stories of Banim or Griffin; no doubt it was Miss Edgeworth that gave Mrs Hall her impulse to set forth the indefeasible traits of Irish character. The Sketches have much fine description, and are instinct not merely with sound and kindly feeling but true and delicate humour; the coquetry of her Irish girls is admirably given. A second series of Sketches of Irish Character (1831) was quite equal to the first; some of the satirical presentations are hit off with great truth and liveliness. In 1832 Mrs Hall ventured on a historical romance, The Buccaneer, the scene being laid in England at the time of the Protectorate, and Oliver himself appearing among the characters. The plot is well managed, and some of the characters-notably that of Barbara the Puritan-are excellent; but the work is too feminine, and has too little of energetic passion for the stormy times in which it is cast. Her Tales of Woman's Trials (1834) are short stories in her happiest style. Uncle Horace (1835) was a novel. Lights and Shadows of Irish Life (3 vols. 1838), originally published in the New Monthly Magazine, were extraordinarily popular; the principal story, 'The Groves of Blarney,' was dramatised and played with eminent success. Marian, or a Young Maid's Fortunes (1840), makes full use again of Mrs Hall's knowledge of Irish character; Katey Macane, the cook who adopts the foundling Marian and watches over her with untiring affection, is equal to any Irish portraiture after those of Miss Edgeworth. Stories of the Irish Peasantry, contributed to Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, were afterwards published in a collected form. In 1840 Mrs Hall aided her husband in an elaborately illustrated work in three volumes, Ireland, its Scenery and Character, skilfully blending topographical and statistical information with the poetical and romantic features of the country, the legends of the peasantry, and scenes and characters of humour or pathos. The Whiteboy (1845) is usually reckoned her best novel. Other works were a fairy tale, Midsummer Eve