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with such unaffectedness and meekness as do not often meet in one."

That love which is based upon principle and reason, and upon a full knowledge of the person loved, may not be the most romantic and sentimental, but it is certainly the most lasting. To the depth, purity, and steadiness of the attachment which Lucy Apsley conceived for John Hutchinson, her whole life bears evidence, not less than her pathetic record of her husband's career. To the strength and wisdom of his affection for her, she never fails to testify: "there never was," she says, "a passion more ardent and less idolatrous." She adds: "He loved her better than his life, with inexpressible tenderness and kindness, had a most high obliging esteem of her, yet still considered honour, religion, and duty above her; nor ever suffered the intrusion of such a dotage as should blind him from marking her imperfections: those he looked upon with such an indulgent eye as did not abate his love and esteem for her, while it augmented his care to blot out all those spots which might make her appear less worthy of that respect he paid her; and thus, indeed, he soon made her more equal to him than he found her; for she was a very faithful mirror, reflecting truly, though but dimly, his own glories upon him, so long as he was present; but she, that was nothing before his inspection gave her a fair figure, when he was removed was only filled with a dark mist, and never could again take in any delightful object, nor return any shining representation."

With all a loving woman's self-abnegation she exclaims, "The greatest excellence she had was the power of apprehending and the virtue of loving his; so, as his shadow, she waited on him everywhere, till he was taken into that region of light which admits of none, and then she vanished into nothing."

The reader will not fail to remark the exquisite beauty of this last sentence; it reflects the exquisite beauty of a refined mind and a tender heart.

The marriage of this well-assorted pair, who in birth, station, person, character, and even age, were so nearly on an equality, was soon decided upon; but the very day that the friends of both parties met to settle the necessary conditions, Lucy Apsley was seized with small-pox. The attack was so severe as to endanger her life; and after her recovery her countenance long retained the ghastly traces of its terrible work. Mr. Hutchinson, however, had been attracted rather by the jewel than by the casket, by the mind rather than the person; and as soon as she was able to quit her chamber, he insisted upon fulfilling his engagement. God granted him a noble reward for his constancy, for after a while she fully recovered her natural comeliness.

They were married in 1638, when Mr. Hutchinson was twenty-three and his bride eighteen years of age. They lived together in great happiness for many years, until, after the restoration of Charles II., he was arrested on a charge of high treason, and imprisoned in Sandan Castle, in Kent. There his wife waited upon him with

loving assiduousness, while exercising all her energies, though in vain, to secure his release. The close confinement, the want of active exercise, and the dampness. of his prison, brought upon him a mortal illness, of which, in the autumn of 1664, he died, with his dying breath testifying to his wife's excellences and to his deep affection for her.

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MARY SIDNEY, COUNTESS OF PEMBROKE.

OST of my readers, I am sure, will be acquainted with Ben Jonson's exquisite epitaph on Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke :

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"Underneath this marble hearse
Lies the subject of all verse-
Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother;
Death, ere thou hast slain another,
Learned and fair and good as she,

Time shall throw a dart at thee."

But it is possible they may not all be aware how well she deserved this delicate and refined eulogium. As daughter, sister, wife, and mother, as a patron of learning and a friend of the learned, as the prudent mistress of a splendid household and the dispenser of a dignified hospitality, as the centre of a glittering social circle and the ornament of a magnificent court, Mary, Countess of

Pembroke, occupied a foremost place among Englishwomen of the sixteenth century. It must be admitted that she was singularly favoured by fortune: she was the daughter of one of Elizabeth's most trusted statesmen, Sir Henry Sidney; she was the sister of the author of "The Arcadia" and the hero of Zutphen; she became the wife of a peer of high character and brilliant position; and the mother of two sons, who, though in the war between Charles I. and the Parliament they took opposite sides, displayed an equality of valour and a community of chivalrous sentiment. She was fortunate, too, in not living to see them arrayed on opposite sides, dying some twenty years before the king raised his ill-fated standard at Newbury.

Mary Sidney was born at Penshurst Place in 1555; and in that fine sylvan demesne which Spenser's memory and Ben Jonson's verse have immortalised, spent the happy years of her girlhood. Her parents superintended her education with loving care, and watched over the due development of her rare mental gifts. She acquired an accurate knowledge of several languages, and learned to write her own with taste and exactness. Her acquirements were so considerable as to draw attention to her even in a time rich in accomplished women; and Osborn, the historian of James I., speaks of her as that sister of Sir Philip Sidney "to whom he addressed his 'Arcadia,' and of whom he had no other advantage than what he received from the partial benevolence of fortune in making him a man (which yet she did, in some judg

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