fully than she did into the eighteenth century's meaning of that word "enthusiasm." She had just the way of looking at things which made Gibbon say of Law, the author of the "Serious Call"; "had not his vigorous mind been clouded by enthusiasm, he might be ranked with the most agreeable and ingenious writers of the times." The "cool and reasonable concern for themselves," which Bishop Butler urged upon his hearers, and that good-humour which, according to Shaftesbury, is not only "the best Security against Enthusiasm, but the best Foundation of Piety and true Religion," were enough for her, as they were for her contemporaries. For her, as for most of them, religion and religious "ordinances. are so far sacred as they are absolutely necessary in all civilized governments," and not very much further. To endeavour to overthrow them is, for that reason, to be "an enemy to mankind"; but as for religion independently, and in itself, it was, in Lady Mary's eyes, a thing of that sort which "Thou shalt not kill, but needst not strive, Officiously to keep alive." There is no unrest of any kind in her, no discontent, divine or otherwise. She was incapable of being disturbed by any

anxiety about the state of her soul, or of the poor, or of her country, or indeed by any "obstinate questionings" of any kind at all. Rich and happy as she was, and universally courted and honoured, with the good health and multiplicity of interests which together defeat the monster ennui, she encouraged no feelings which she could not justify to her reason, took the world very much as she found it, and learned to unite the carefully - acquired common sense of the Epicurean to the inherited complaisance of the Whig. In all this, except the good sense and the absence of vices, she is very like her contemporaries. But she is a great deal beside which they never thought of being. She is the friend of Addison, the friend, and, of course, also the enemy of Pope; she is the woman who had the courage to introduce the system of inoculation to her countrymen, and the practical kindliness to teach Italian peasants the art of making butter; who received the gift of a house from one foreign city, and refused the offer of a statue from another; above all, for us to-day, she is the bright, good - humoured, charming personality, interested in everything, and carrying our interest along with her own, born, as she

says, with a passion for learning, teaching herself for want of better teachers, translating Epictetus in her childhood, and managing, in an old age of solitude and retreat, by farming and gardening, and especially by reading, never to "have half an hour heavy on her hands." And she is something else too, without which we should never have known anything about her at all she is the writer of letters so easy, so bright, so intelligent, in the fullest and best sense, that it has been possible, if not for truth, at least for patriotic prejudice, to speak of them in the same. breath with those of Madame de Sévigné.

That parallel cannot indeed be justified when the case is carried before the higher courts of appeal. Those who care for the finer things in literature will never be able to rise with the same feelings after reading Lady Mary as they experience when they put down a volume of Madame de Sévigné. Not only in delicacy and good taste, but in depth of character and all the qualities that make up what we think of as the "soul," Lady Mary is immeasurably inferior to her great predecessor. There could not be a clearer proof of it than her astonishing failure to see more in the letters to Madame de

Grignan than "sometimes the tittle-tattle of a fine lady, sometimes that of an old nurse, always tittle-tattle." But if she is not, in any real sense, Madame de Sévigné's equal, there are enough points. of likeness between them to make the comparison inevitable. Each of them owes her fame to her letters, and knows no rival among her countrywomen in that art; each was born and lived all her life in the highest society of her day; literature was the favourite amusement of each, and good sense and good temper the favourite philosophy; each, above all, had a single strong attachment, and sent the bulk, and the best, of her letters to the daughter who was the passion of her life. Resemblances of this sort are of course superficial, not essential; and perhaps if Lady Mary had not herself invited the comparison one would sympathize with her in the accidents which made it so inevitable. However, when that has once been put aside there are few others which she need fear. In her own day and her own style she has no rival. Much indeed of the difference between her and Madame de Sévigné is due to her having lived a hundred years later. In her, as in the best known men and women of her day,

the intelligence had gradually usurped an almost exclusive domination. There is nothing which she or Voltaire or Gibbon could not look at with perfect directness. and serenity. Their business is with facts, and their object simply to understand and make the best of them. Practical benevolence may come into their scheme. of life; Lady Mary, indeed, and others of her time and temper accomplished far more for the good of their neighbours than people before and after who have professed to be, and perhaps have actually been, full of the intensest sympathy for the lot of humanity in this world or the next. But what the typical man or woman of the eighteenth century does for others is done without pretence of deep feeling, not so much from the heart as from the intelligence, as if the mainspring of action were simply impatience at the intolerable stupidity which so generally characterizes our poor human attempts to be happy. Their attitude, in fact, to be seen on every page of Lady Mary's letters, is the attitude made classical in literature by the genius of Horace. "Immortalia ne speres," "frui paratis," and the rest, might have been the motto. at the head of every sheet. Her philosophy