It was amusing to hear her talk, in her somewhat affected and stilted style, of politics. She was a Jacobin, and hated all Dissenters, whom she sneered at as Roundheads. With modern ideas she and her sisters had no sympathy whatever. There never was such an antediluvian family. All of them were very long-lived, and must have bitterly bewailed the progress of Democracy and Dissent. I question whether the “Lives of the Queens of England” has many readers now. Near Woodbridge, as rector of Benhall, lived the Rev. J. Mitford, an active literary man, the editor of _The Gentleman’s Magazine_, and of some of the standard works known as Pickering’s Classics. As a clergyman he was a failure. It was urged in his defence, by his friends, that his profession had been chosen for him by others, and that when it was too late for him to escape from the bonds which held him in thrall he made the discovery that the life that lay before him was utterly uncongenial to his tastes and habits. His life, when in Suffolk, writes Mrs. Houston, author of “A Woman’s Memories of World-known Men,” must have been a very solitary one. For causes which I have never heard explained, his wife had long left him, and his only son was not on speaking terms with the Rector of Benhall. In his small lodgings on the second floor in Sloane Street, he was doubtless a far happier man than, in spite of his well-loved garden and extensive library at Benhall Rectory, he ever, in his country home, professed to be. But perhaps the most notable East Anglian author at the time was Isaac Taylor, of Ongar, whose books—“The Natural History of Enthusiasm” and “The Physical Theory of Another Life”—were most popular, and one of which, at any rate, had been noticed in _The Edinburgh Review_. In a private letter to the editor, Sir James Stephen describes Taylor “as a very considerable man, with but small inventive but very great diffusive powers, possessing a considerable mastery of language, but very apt to be over-mastered by it—too fine a writer to write very well; too fastidious a censor to judge men and things equitably; too much afraid of falling into cant and vulgarity to rise to freedom and ease; an over-polished Dissenter, a little ashamed of his origin among that body; but, with all this, a man of vigorous and catholic understanding, of eminent purity of mind, happy in himself and in all manner of innocent pleasure, and strenuously devoted to the grand but impracticable task of grafting on the intellectual democracy of our own times the literary aristocracy of the days that are passed.” Quite a different man was dear old Bernard Barton, the Quaker poet, of Woodbridge, with whom I dined once, who was more fat than bard beseems, and who seemed to me to enjoy a good dinner, a glass of port—people could drink port in those days—and a pinch of snuff, quite as much as any literary talk. Poor Bernard never set the Thames on fire—he would have been shocked at the thought of doing