in the great, gay, gloomy life of Vienna, to hear once more the foolish squabbles of Ratisbon society as to who should and should not be styled Excellency, and to smile at the loyal crowds of English thronging the wretched inns of Hanover. But the fidelity of her descriptions may best be judged from her accounts of life in Constantinople. The Vienna of to-day is very different from the ill-built, high-storied city of Maria Theresa; but the condition of Constantinople has scarcely changed with the century and a half that has gone by since Lady Mary was English Ambassadress there. She seems, indeed, to have seen the heads upon the famous monument of bronze twisted serpents in the Hippodrome; and perhaps she did, for Spon and Wheler's sketch of it in 1675 gives it with the triple heads still perfect, though these serpent heads, and all traces of them, have long since disappeared. In Constantinople Lady Mary first became acquainted with that principle of inoculation for the small-pox which she so enthusiastically advocated, which she introduced into England in spite of so much hostility and disfavor, and which, now accepted by almost all the civilized world, is still wrangled fiercely over in England. [Sidenote: 1716--Lady Mary's career] Perhaps we may anticipate by some half-century to tell of Lady Mary's further career. She came back to London again, and shone as brilliantly as before, and was made love to by Pope, and laughed at her lover, and was savagely scourged by him in return with whips of stinging and shameful satire. One can understand better the story of the daughters of Lycambes hanging themselves under the pain of the iambics of Archilochus when one reads the merciless cruelty with which the great English satirist treated the woman he had loved. When Lady Mary grew old she went away abroad to live, without any opposition on her husband's part. They parted with mutual indifference and mutual esteem. She lived for many years in Italy, chiefly in Venice. Then she came back to London for a short time to live in lodgings off Hanover Square, and be the curiosity of the town; and then she died. Lady Mary always had a dread of growing old; and she grew old and ill-favored, as Horace Walpole was spiteful enough to put on record. When Pope was laughed at by the beauty, he might have said to her in the words that Clarendon used to the fair Castlemaine, "Woman, you will grow old," and have felt that in those words he had almost repaid the bitterness of her scorn. Horace Walpole indeed avenged the offended poet, long dead and famous, when he wrote thus of Lady Mary: "Her dress, her avarice, and her impudence must amaze any one that never heard her name. She wears a foul mob that does not cover her greasy black locks, that hang loose, never combed or curled; an old mazarine blue wrapper, that gapes open and discovers a canvas petticoat. Her face . . . partly covered . . . with white paint, which