fell; till circumstances, as wonderful as they are fortunate, combined to plant her in the foremost ranks of literature and fashion. This gives her an immense advantage over autobiographers in general. She is free to say what she pleases, and to say it as she pleases; and if the public be perverse enough to discredit her statements wholly or in part, what is that to her? The public will read her book and talk about it, and the subject of it; and her manes, if she have any manes, will for a while be gladdened. There are two ways of telling the story of Lady Morgan’s infancy and girlhood. The first, or poetical, which is her own, describes her as descended from an old Irish family—as the daughter of a man of brilliant genius and the highest sense of honour—as coming into the world at a moment when this great and good man’s affairs happened, unfortunately, to be in confusion; and as thus forced, without any fault of his or her own, to make a too early acquaintance with poverty and its attendant evils. The other, or prosaic, which has no foundation to rest upon except vulgar fact, says that Sydney Owenson was the daughter of a strolling player, who could never clearly distinguish between _meum_ and _tuum_—who was always rollicking, light-hearted, and merry—who spent every farthing which he earned faster than it came in, was often in prison, and perpetually in debt. The poetic, or Lady Morgan’s reading, further shows that the Owensons or M‘Owens came from one of the great houses of Connaught, which at some remote period, date unknown, had lost or forfeited their enormous estates; that her grandfather, a handsome young yeoman, ran away with her grandmother, and that, though very poor, they lived, upon the whole, comfortably and respectably together. The other, or prosaic version, seems to say that it was Miss Owenson’s grandmother who ran away with her grandfather; that she fell in love with his _illigant_ Hibernian proportions on the occasion of a great curling-match, and never let him alone till he had made her his wife. It is not, however, so easy, as we advance in this interesting history, to follow the line which separates the ideal from the real; but this much at least is certain, that before the end of a year the _ci-devant_ Miss Crofton became the mother of Robert M‘Owen, and that Robert M‘Owen became in due course of time the father of Sydney Lady Morgan.