There are some significant traces of the effects of this lady’s early training in the letters which she wrote from the time she was twelve years of age till she had reached her twenty-second year, when she married. These letters were addressed to a friend older than herself, Lady Margaret Cavendish Harley, who, in 1734, became Duchess of Portland. They are sprightly and forcible, but they are not “girlish.” In one of the earliest, written at Horton, near Hythe, Kent (one of the estates which Matthew gained by his marriage), she says: “My papa is a little vapoured, and last night, after two hours’ silence, he broke out into a great exclamation against the country, and concluded by saying, that living in the country was sleeping with one’s eyes open. He has ordered me to put a double quantity of saffron in his tea.” For what purpose this remedy was ordered, may be guessed from a passage in a comedy of Charles the Second’s time, by Howard. “Saffron-posset-drink is very good against the heaviness of the spirits,” says Mrs. Arbella, in “The Committee.” Young Miss Robinson was fond of illustrating her early letters by images taken from life, and set up after the fashion of popular novelists. One of these figures occurs in a letter addressed to the Duchess of Portland, in May, 1734, when the lively writer had not yet completed her fourteenth year: “I am surprised that my answer to your Grace’s letter has never reached your hands. I sent it immediately to Canterbury, by the servant of a gentleman who dined here; and I suppose he forgot to put it in the post.... If my letter were sensible, what would be its mortification, that, instead of having the honour to kiss your Grace’s hands, it must live confined in the footman’s pocket, with greasy gloves, rotten apples, mouldy nuts, a pack of dirty cards, and the only companion of its sort—a tender epistle from his sweetheart, ‘tru till Deth;’ perhaps, by its situation, subject to be kicked by his master every morning, till at last, by ill-usage and rude company, worn too thin for any other use, it may make its exit by lighting a tobacco-pipe.”