was her maiden name- -came of a good stock, being the great-granddaughter of that brilliant cavalier Sir Bevil Granville, who fell at Lansdowne Field, near Bath, fight-. ing under Charles I.'s banner. She was also a niece of Lord Lansdowne ; and of such, in the belief of fashionable society, is the kingdom of heaven! At the age of six she was entrusted to the charge of a Mademoiselle Puelle, a French refugee of respectable character, who seems to have been much better fitted for her post than the majority of the schoolmistresses of the day. She received, we are told, not more than twenty pupils at a time. Under her felicitous auspices, Mary learned French and music, for both of which she appears to have had much natural aptitude. She was ten years old when she first heard and saw the great composer of The Messiah. "We had no better instrument in the house," she says, "than a little spinnet of mine, on which that great musician performed wonders. I was much struck with his playing, but struck as a child, not as a judge; for, the moment he was gone, I seated myself to my instrument, and played the best lesson I had then learned. My uncle archly asked me whether I thought I should ever play as well as Mr. Handel. If I did not think I should,' cried I, 'I would burn my instrument!' Such was the innocent presumption of childish ignorance."

When she was about fifteen years of age, a reverse of fortune-words which seem so simple, and mean so much!-compelled her father to reduce his style of living, and retire into the country: a great disappoint

"I

ment to a young lady who had been brought up with the expectation of becoming a maid of honour, who had been at one play and one opera, and thought the poet's description of the Elysian Fields trivial as compared with the pleasures of those entertainments. She was kept to her fixed routine of so many hours for music, French, reading, and writing; after which she was expected to sit down "to work." While wife and daughter plied their assiduous needles, the head of the household read aloud. In the evening, the minister of the parish would often call, and she was then required to join with her parents and their visitor in a quiet rubber. All her amusements were of an equally mild character. took great delight," she says, "in a closet I had, which was furnished with little drawings and cut paper of my own doing. I had a desk and shelves for my books." The monotony of her life was relieved, however, by a friendship which she formed with a neighbouring clergyman's daughter, a girl of her own age. "She had an uncommon genius and intrepid spirit," says Mrs. Delany, "which, though really innocent, alarmed my father, and made him uneasy at my great attachment to her. He loved gentleness and reserve in the behaviour of women, and could not bear anything that had the appearance of being too free and masculine; but as I was convinced of her innocence, I saw no fault in her. She entertained me with her wit, and she flattered me with her approbation, but by the improvement she has since made, I see she was not, at my first acquaintance, the perfect creature

I thought her then. . . . Her extraordinary understanding, lively imagination, and humane disposition, which soon became conspicuous, at last reconciled my father to her." And there can be no doubt that she helped largely to form Mary Granville's character and develop her intellect at that critical time when girlhood is blossoming into maidenhood, and the prefigurement of the coming woman is already visible.

LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU.

Lady Mary Pierrepont, eldest daughter of Evelyn, Earl of Kingston (afterwards favoured with a ducal coronet), and of his wife, the Lady Mary Fielding, was born at Thoresby-in-Sherwood, Nottinghamshire, about 1690. Her mother died when she was only four years old; but her father took special charge of her education, and did his best to educe and foster the high intellectual qualities which, at an early age, she conspicuously displayed. He was not less proud of her personal charms than of her mental endowments. It is on record that, one evening, in 1697, when present at a convivial gathering of the famous Kit Cat Club,-the beauties of the season having been freely toasted, the Earl of Kingston rose and proposed, as La plus belle des plus belles, his daughter, Lady Mary. Some of the members the rules of the Club

demurred, on the ground that prevented them from doing honour to a beauty whom they had never seen. "Then you shall see her!" he exclaimed, and immediately sent an order for her to be

finely dressed and brought to him at the tavern. On her arrival the child-beauty was welcomed with shouts of admiration her claim was unanimously confirmed,her health drunk with enthusiasm ; and her name, according to custom, engraved upon a drinking-glass. For my part I pity the tender child exposed to the rude roving glances of these men of fashion, and censure the father whose vanity forced upon her the exposure; but she herself appears to have been mightily pleased with it. 66 Pleasure," she wrote, later in life, was too poor a word to express my sensations. They amounted to ecstasy. Never again throughout my life did I pass so happy an evening."

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In our palmy educational age, when Newnham and Girton are annually producing so abundant a crop of girl-graduates, we should set but small value upon Lady Mary's curriculum of studies; yet was it in many respects superior to that of her young contemporaries. Probably she did not derive much of it from her instructors, but most from the large library at Thoresby, in the happy pastures of which she roamed at will. She acquired a knowledge of Greek and Latin,-and tested her classical proficiency by making a Latin version of the Erxeípidiov of Epictetus. This was corrected by Bishop Burnet, to whom she was under considerable obligations, she writes, for "condescending to direct the studies of a girl." Her reading, as with all quiet and self-taught minds, was exceedingly miscellaneous: nothing came amiss to her; and a good memory and a clear intelligence