Subsequently to this painful collision with Mrs. Lee at the Oxford Assizes, I heard nothing of her for many years, excepting only this--that she was residing in the family of an English clergyman distinguished for his learning and piety. This account gave great pleasure to my mother--not only as implying some chance that Mrs. Lee might be finally reclaimed from her unhappy opinions, but also as a proof that, in submitting to a rustication so mortifying to a woman of her brilliant qualifications, she must have fallen under some influences more promising for her respectability and happiness than those which had surrounded her in London. Finally, we saw by the public journals that she had written and published a book. The title I forget; but by its subject it was connected with political or social philosophy. And one eminent testimony to its merit I myself am able to allege, viz., Wordsworth's. Singular enough it seems, that he who read so very little of modern literature, in fact, next to nothing, should be the sole critic and reporter whom I have happened to meet upon Mrs. Lee's work. But so it was: accident had thrown the book in his way during one of his annual visits to London, and a second time at Lowther Castle. He paid to Mrs. Lee a compliment which certainly he paid to no other of her contemporaries, viz., that of reading her book very nearly to the end; and he spoke of it repeatedly as distinguished for vigor and originality of thought. FOOTNOTES [1] "_My sister Mary's governess_."--This governess was a Miss Wesley, niece to John Wesley, the founder of Methodism. And the mention of _her_ recalls to me a fact, which was recently revived and misstated by the whole newspaper press of the island. It had been always known that some relationship existed between the Wellesleys and John Wesley. Their names had, in fact, been originally the same; and the Duke of Wellington himself, in the earlier part of his career, when sitting in the Irish House of Commons, was always known to the Irish journals as Captain Wesley. Upon this arose a natural belief that the aristocratic branch of the house had improved the name into Wellesley. But the true process of change had been precisely the other way. Not Wesley had been expanded into Wellesley, but, inversely, Wellesley had been contracted by household usage into Wesley. The name must have been _Wellesley_ in its earliest stage, since it was founded upon a connection with Wells Cathedral, It had obeyed the same process as prevails in many hundreds of other names: St. Leger, for instance, is always pronounced as if written Sillinger; Cholmondeley as Chumleigh; Marjoribanks as Marchbanks; and the illustrious name of Cavendish was for centuries familiarly pronounced Candish; and Wordsworth has even introduced this name into verse so as to compel the reader, by a metrical coercion, into calling it Candish. Miss Wesley's family had great musical sensibility and skill. This led the