and to comment on. How can one not follow with interest, attention, and respect, often with gratitude and admiration, the chain of circumstances which have accomplished a thought of God? Coleridge promised among the subjects of the Friend to "give characters met with in real life." To present one such portrait, with "thoughts and remembrance fitted," is the object of our ambition; and in this attempt, though we shall be unavoidably restrained by many considerations, there will be no disguise, as in the allegorical narrative once so celebrated under the title of "Le grand Cyrus," in which Mlle. de Scudéry described Mme. de Longueville under the name of Mandane *. It will not be a psychological romance, as they now say. It will be a strictly true delineation of a real character. This some one feels it his duty to attempt, and this is the end and the scope of his design-no more. It is to comply with the desire of the poet saying,

"Give us, for our abstractions, solid facts;

For our disputes, plain pictures;—

Or rather, as we stand on holy earth,

And have the dead around us, take from them

Your instances ;

Epitomize their life; pronounce, if you can,
Authentic epitaphs."

There is, moreover, every guarantee for the fidelity, at least, with which the work will be executed, since it is one who for many years was never absent for a single day from the original that will hold the pencil. It is a copy made as it were on the spot, and then submitted to the correction of those who were best qualified to judge of the likeness; so that nothing was wanting to ensure success in the attempt to revive what the poet speaks of as having been once

"a conspicuous flower

Admired for beauty, for her sweetness praised,
Whom he had sensibility to love,

Ambition to attempt, and grace to win."

*Cousin, La Société Française au xviie Siècle.

It will not be a continuous narrative of facts, as if we were justified in considering as trifles all that might appear so to those who recognize no virtue in the mind, and can conceive no dignity in any incident which does not act on their senses by its external accompaniments. Indeed, to continue using the words of a great author, "the spirit of genuine biography is in nothing more conspicuous than in the firmness with which it withstands the cravings of worthless curiosity, as distinguished from the thirst after useful knowledge. The great end of biography," he continues, "is to fix the attention and to interest the feelings of men on those qualities and actions which have made a particular life worthy of being recorded." What shall be mentioned here will not seem frivolous to those "who know," as this author says, "how great a thing the possession of any one simple truth is, and how mean a thing a mere fact is, except as seen in the light of some comprehensive truth *.”

Antiquity has known instances of grave and thoughtful men, who sought an escape to the beautiful forms of a noble conversation, intermixed with piety, during intervals of active life, and in the most sorrowful hours of their country, or of the world, though it were but to breathe for an instant the fragrance of an embalmed air. They took their way unblamed through flowers

"Sutilibus sertis omne rubebat iter."

Why should not the same permission be extended to others in our own times, however little disposed to what is calm and profound in the moral phenomena of human life?

"Communities are lost, and empires die,
And things of holy use unhallow'd lie;

They perish; but the intellect can raise,

From airy words alone, a pile that ne'er decays."

To awaken such an intellect, under the most adverse conditions, and enable it to achieve its purpose, is one of the consequences of studying an exquisite model. Such is the power of dispensing blessings which Providence has attached to the truly good, that they cannot even die without advantage to their

* Coleridge.

fellow-creatures: for death consecrates their example, and the wisdom which might have been slighted at the hearth, becomes oracular from the tomb.

If the writer might, in conclusion, just touch one chord, attending to what concerns no one, he would repeat the poet's lines, and say,

"Stripp'd as I am of all the golden fruit
Of self-esteem, and by the cutting blasts
Of self-reproach familiarly assail'd,

I would not yet be of such wintry barrenness,
But that some leaf of her regard should hang
Upon my naked branches."

Or he might seek to console his fancy by repeating what the Italian said of his own condition amidst the solitude of his latter years:

แ non omnia terræ

Obruta! vivit amor, vivit dolor! ora negatur
Dulcia conspicere: flere et meminisse relictum est."

CHAPTER II.

ANE MARY was the youngest daughter of Thomas Dillon, of Mount Dillon, and of Edestown, in the county Kildare, in Ireland. Some of her nearest relations had long been naturalized in France, where the celebrated Count Edward Dillon was amongst her earliest friends; the gallant general who fell at the head of his own troops, a victim to the revolution, having fulfilled his destiny long before her birth. Married at the age when one espouses not a fortune, but a heart; possessing, too, what St. Chrysostom calls the bond of marriage, σúvdeoμos toũ yápov, namely, that beauty which God, as he says, "having compassion on our laborious and miserable life, gave to us, as

an adornment and a consolation*;" led to the altar, to use the common phrase, in a kind of granary, which served the Catholics of Dover at that time for Chapel,-the children of the place might have sung before her with Jasmin, while throwing a few flowers or green leaves upon the pavement,

"Les chemins devraient fleurir,
Tant belle épousée va sortir;

Devraient fleurir, devraient grener,
Tant belle épousée va passer."

Those were days, when many being smitten with a taste even for the oldest French literature, she might have been thought a living instance to suggest the lines of Alain Chartier, written in his own excuse.

"Cuides tu faire basilisques

Qui occient les gens des yeulx,
Les doulx visaiges angeliques
Qui semblent estre fais és cieulx,
Dieu ne les a pas formé tieulx
Pour desdaigner et non chaloir,

Mais pour croistre de bien en mieulx

Ceulx qui ont desir de valoir."

Allied thus at an early age, through a younger branch, to the Digbys of Laundenstown, whose lands those of her father nearly joined, she became a happy mother, and while uniting the employments of Martha and Mary, may be truly said to have passed doing good. From her first entrance upon the world, with few and short intervals, she lived either abroad, or in domestic retirement, comprising but a small external circle. As daughter, sister, wife, mother, mistress of a family, and friend, wanting nothing that is praisable in a woman, she moved with firm yet light steps, alike unostentatious and alike exemplary. She attained in years but to half the duration usually allotted to human life, departing rather than dying, as we shall observe fully later, at the age of forty-two. This is a short biography;

* St. Chrysost. in Dan. cap. 1, Interp.

and as stated thus there certainly seems to be nothing whatever in its circumstances to justify any one for seeking to construct out of it a public monument. But the drama of such a life is in general what German philosophers call subjective; and, with regard to this particular instance, if one has leave to speak one's conscience, it would be difficult to find an existence in any sphere more capable of serving one of the highest and most important purposes to which the loftiest of human minds could in another form devote its faculties, for it might be made to show what is a life of faith, even in the times we live in,-the value not being diminished in consideration of its having been seen in the person, not of a hero or philosopher, but of a simple woman; for in every human being the results of the faith which animated her are analogous, and if well considered heroic, consonant with the highest wisdom, grand and beautiful; and with regard to the circumstance of those having been witnessed under such conditions, it must not be forgotten that the experience of each successive age of the world, not to say of each generation, and even year that passes, will only prove with what accurate judgment, and with what practical knowledge of all that contributes to the safety and happiness of human life, that mind was formed which prompted the oft-repeated exclamation, "Fallax gratia, et vana est pulcritudo; mulier timens Dominum ipsa laudabitur, "-well-known words indeed, but which are only one form of expression for a life of faith; since fear supposes belief in the existence of the power contemplated.

Let us in the first instance, therefore, consider the subject of our notice in relation to faith, which gift constitutes in truth the basis, and, one might add, the whole superstructure of the character which is now to pass before us; though here we are to consider it only in relation to that gift, and without any reference to what will follow later.

A genuine thing when once found can never be too deeply and attentively considered. Now the faith which animated this one mind, and governed this entire life, this collective energy, this total act of the whole moral being, of which the living sensorium was in the heart, presents a spectacle which the greatest and loftiest intellects, as well as the most weak of the human family, should study and ponder on, if they have any regard for