darkly interpreted in the popular mind by the subsequent shameful marriage with Bothwell, deprived her of that strong support, and thenceforth she was a queen in name only. Material power was irretrievably gone; but in the solitude of Fotheringay Castle her moral royalty resumed its empire, and Mary, prisoned and slain by lawless violence, shields the beautiful Queen of Scots far more effectually than her stoutest and most eloquent champions, from the arrows of a demonstrative accusation which would else be irresistible.

LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGUE.

THE

HE members of the very exclusive Kit-Kat Club assembled in council at the commencement of the London season, 1698, to nominate the lady who should be their standing toast for the current year-have her honoured name inscribed upon their drinking-glasses, and her portrait painted in Kit-Kat fashion,—were considerably puzzled for a choice; when the Earl of Dorchester, afterwards Duke of Kingston, suggested the eldest of his three daughters, the Lady Mary Pierrepoint. This proposition being demurred to, inasmuch as the said Lady Mary Pierrepoint was personally unknown to the members of the club, the Earl volunteered to go at once and bring her there for approval. He soon returned, bringing with him a beautiful child of about eight years of age, the Lady Mary in question, who was received with acclamation, declared the toast of the year, and remained throughout the banquet, receiving the compliments and caresses of the members with a delighted ease far more womanly than child-like, so early responsive to opportunity was her gay coquetry of nature. The emotions of gratified vanity excited upon this occasion left an indelible impression on her mind. "Pleasure were too poor a word," she exclaims, "to express my sensations: never again throughout my life have I spent so happy a day." There is an unconscious self-revelation in these few words rarely observable in her ladyship's clever and elaborate correspondence with all its artistic confidences, and here and there apparent abandon.

The charming girl thus oddly introduced to the society of a drinking-club was born in 1690, at Thoresby, Nottinghamshire, and had lost her mother (before marriage, the Lady Mary Fielding, the daughter of the Earl of Denbigh) when she was in her fifth year only, since when her education had been under the direction of the Earl, her father, of the same quality and reach as that of her brother, the Viscount Newark. With such facility did she acquire a familiarity with the Greek and Latin classics and Parliamentary politics, that before she had left off her frocks, she had translated Epictetus, and sent her performance to the Lord Bishop of Salisbury, accompanied by a long, verbose letter, in which she prattles sententiously of "the sinking liberties of England," only to be saved from final wreck by his Right Reverend Lordship's "fortitude of soul," and, moreover, dilates upon the necessity of ladies being learned, (in a conventional sense learned, that is,-versed in Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Martial, etcetera,) in order to reclaim them to piety, -there being, she positively assures the Bishop, more Atheists among fine ladies than the loosest sort of rakes;" a rather bold venture in such a department of comparative statistics for a young girl of fifteen to make! Lady Mary's studies in modern, and especially English literature, contrasted strikingly with the lofty range of her classical acquirements, being chiefly confined to romances, in which Damons and Phylisses, Clelias and Celadons, Harriet Byrons and Pharamonds, sighed and simpered through interminable volumes of fantastic sentiment and puerile adventure; whilst, in dramatic writing, the beau idéal from which she never swerved was the tragedy of "George Barnwell." In other respects, Lady Mary Pierrepoint's home culture had a direct tendency to prematurely mould a girl of

her temperament and mental force into a self-confident, 'strong-minded" woman of the world. She presided in her father's household and at his table almost before she was physically capable of doing so-a principal duty being to carve for and urgently importune each individual guest to eat more than he had inclination for; an office that, from the conversational contact incident thereto, must have been utterly destructive of the charm and sanctity of maidenly sensitiveness and reserve. A very attractive, much-admired personage, withal, was the Lady Mary Pierrepoint—handsome, graceful, vivacious, buoyant with animal life, and the wittiest woman of her time-if wit consist in phrasing brilliantly, by no means extraordinarily brilliant, subtle, or suggestive thoughts. She herself, indeed, had the highest opinion of herself, and especially of her epistolary powers: "Keep my letters," she exclaims, with laughable self-appreciation; "they will be as good as Madame de Sévigné's, forty years hence." One of the earliest of the compositions-and a favourable specimen, too—that were to rival the sparkling and tender effusions of the spirituelle, loving, unselfish Frenchwoman, is the following clever and coarse epistle, addressed to her intimate friend, Anne Wortley, the daughter of Mr. Sidney Wortley Montague, a son of Admiral Montague, Earl of Sandwich, from Yorkshire :—

"In the first form of these creatures (the Yorkshire beaux) is Mr. Vanbrog. Heaven, no doubt compassionating our dulness, has inspired him with a passion that makes us all ready to die with laughing. 'Tis credibly reported that he is endeavouring at the honourable estate of matrimony, and vows to lead a sinful life no more. Whether pure holiness inspires his mind, or dotage turns his brain, is hard to say. 'Tis certain he keeps Monday and Thursday market

L

you

(Assembly days) constantly, and for those that don't regard worldly muck there's extra good choice indeed. I believe last Monday there were two hundred pieces of woman's flesh fat and lean, but know Van's taste was always odd. His inclination to ruins has given him a taste for Mrs. Yarborough: he sighs and ogles so that it would do your heart good to see him, and she is not a little pleased, in so small a proportion of men amongst such a number of women, that a whole man should fall to her share."

Lady Mary's intense love of admiration and applause was gratified by the more or less sincere adulation of numerous danglers-lovers they called themselves, and many no doubt were; and it is difficult to say which delighted her most the incense offered to the woman or the wit, her beauty or her genius. It happened, however, that her friend Miss Anne Wortley's brother, the Honourable Edward Wortley Montague, a learned, methodic gentleman, and member of Parliament, either had or affected to have a contempt for feminine talent and acquirement; but Lady Mary chancing to meet him one day at his sister's, so effectually exerted her powers of fascination, that the disdainful gentleman was vanquished at once-not by wit, as her biographers pretend, which never yet had power to appreciably quicken a masculine pulse, but by her face and figure, as she well knew, and her married life abundantly proved. It was found during this first very vivacious colloquy with her future husband, that she had not read Quintus Curtius; a circumstance which afforded Mr. Wortley Montague an excellent opportunity of improving his acquaintance with her charming ladyship, by sending her on the following day a handsomelybound copy, with these leaden lines written on the fly-leaf:—