With renewed health came uninterrupted happiness, and gay mingling in gay society, and audacity of expression when describing it. Elizabeth Robinson had felt almost as much contempt for the fops among the soldiers of her day, as disgust for the country Polyphemuses who made her wrathful with their wooing. Very severe was she on “the scarlet beaux,” who were ordered to Flanders. “I think,” she says, “they will die of a panic and save their enemies’ powder. Well! they are proper gentlemen. Heaven defend the nunneries! I will venture a wager Flanders increases in the christenings more than in the burials of the week.” In describing changes in fashion, she makes singular application of her historical knowledge. In 1741, she wrote to her sister, from town: “I do not know what will become of your fine shape, for there is a fashionable make which is very strange. I believe they look in London as they did in Rome after the Rape of the Sabines!” As this fair young Elizabeth remembered her history on one occasion, so did she show on another that she had not forgotten her church catechism. “As for modern marriages,” wrote the lady, just then going out of her teens, “they are great infringers of the baptismal vow; for it is commonly the pomps and vanities of this wicked world on one side, and the sinful lusts of the flesh on the other.” There are traces throughout Miss Robinson’s early letters of how it went with her own heart and its sympathies. In her eighteenth year, she wrote to the Duchess of Portland: “I never saw one man that I loved.” She added to this assertion such an endless list of virtues, merits, qualities, etc., which she expected to find in that happy individual, as to lead to the conclusion that a monster so faultless would never be created. She even half-acknowledged as much; for she wrote, “I am like Pygmalion, in love with a picture of my own drawing; but I never saw an original like it in my life. I hope when I do, I shall, as some poet says, find the ‘statue warm.’” In her nineteenth year, she gave utterance to a pretty petulance in these words: “I wish some of our neighbours had married two and twenty years ago; we should have had a gallant young neighbourhood; but they have lost time, and we have lost lovers by that delay.” To a remark of her sister’s, that, if she were not heedful, some handsome fool would win her in spite of herself, she replied, that, to win her heart, “it must be rather fair-spoken than fair-faced.” She was not much moved when rivals in beauty passed into the married state before her. In 1741, there are the following autobiographical details in letters to the wife of the Reverend Mr. Freind, of Canterbury: “I saw some fine jewels that are to adorn my fair enemy, Mrs. S——. I beheld them without envy, and was proud to think that a woman who is thought worthy to wear jewels to adorn her person, should do me the honour to envy and hate me.... Surely,