The introduction to this interesting work is from the editor, and it is written with a Walpole felicity in its points, though we would rather have had it more continuous than anecdotical. Our purpose we have professed to be, to gossip with Lady Mary, and we therefore shall make but two extracts from the introduction,--the one because it is _perhaps_ leaning to the unfeeling; the other, because it is indisputably the truth of feeling. Madame de Sevigné did not deserve the phrase which we have marked in italics in the following passage, and indeed Lady Mary, in one of her letters, announces herself as a successful rival of this very agreeable French letter-writer,--an announcement which ought to have cautioned an editor against depreciating the powers of one whom the edited had chosen to select as a rival. "The modern world will smile, but should however beware of too hastily despising works that charmed Lady Mary Wortley in her youth, and were courageously defended by Madame de Sevigné even when hers was past, and they began to be sliding out of fashion. She, it seems, thought with the _old woman_ just now mentioned, that they had a tendency to elevate the mind, and to instil honourable and generous sentiments. At any rate they must have fostered application and perseverance, by accustoming their readers to what the French term _des ouvrages de longue haleine_. After resolutely mastering Clelia, nobody could pretend to quail at the aspect of Mezeray, or even at that of Holinshed's Chronicle printed in black letter. Clarendon, Burnet, and Rapin, had not yet issued into daylight." With the foregoing extract (and all critics should get rid of their bile as quickly as they can) all that is unpleasant is at rest. Let us give the following feeling, beautiful anecdote. "The name of another young friend will excite more attention--Mrs. Anne Wortley. _Mrs._ Anne has a most mature sound to our modern ears; but, in the phraseology of those days, _Miss_, which had hardly yet ceased to be a term of reproach, still denoted childishness, flippancy, or some other contemptible quality, and was rarely applied to young ladies of a respectable class. In Steele's Guardian, the youngest of Nestor Ironside's wards, aged fifteen, is Mrs. Mary Lizard. Nay, Lady Bute herself could remember having been styled Mrs. Wortley, when a child, by two or three elderly visitors, as tenacious of their ancient modes of speech as of other old fashions. Mrs. Anne, then, was the second daughter of Mr. Sidney[20] Wortley Montagu, and the favourite sister of his son Edward. She died in the bloom of youth, unmarried. Lady Mary, in common with others who had known her, represented her as eminently pretty and agreeable; and her brother so cherished her memory, that, in after times, his little girl knew it to be the highest mark of his favour, when, pointing at herself, he said to her mother, "Don't you think she grows like my poor sister Anne?"