The connexion between the families of Basset and Pendarves is amusingly illustrated by the record of a marriage which took place at St. Stephen's in Branwell, on 12th April, 1737, the scribe who entered the event in the Parish Register describing the bridegroom as 'a Squar,' that being the nearest approach which the parish clerk's acquaintance with orthography enabled him to make towards writing the happy man down an Esquire. We now come to what I cannot help considering a very interesting period in the family history--interesting not so much from the importance of the incidents chronicled (though they give us a curious peep into the interior of a Cornish gentleman's household early in the last century), as from their having been recorded by the pen of the beautiful and accomplished Mary Grenville, a descendant of the old Cornish family of Stow, better known to us nowadays as the Mrs. Delany to whom Ballard dedicated his 'Celebrated British Ladies,' and whose autobiography, edited by one of her descendants, Lady Llanover, is, notwithstanding its portentous length, one of the most entertaining books of modern times. When only sixteen or seventeen years of age, Mary Grenville married her first husband, Alexander Pendarves, of Roscrow near Penryn, he being then sixty years old. She describes with much vivacity her first acquaintance with her Cornish home, and her grumpy old husband whom she styles in her diary 'Gromio.' The old man had quarrelled with Francis Basset for marrying, as his second wife, Gromio's niece, Mary, daughter and heiress of his younger brother, the Rev. John Pendarves of Drewsteignton, and for refusing his offer to settle upon Francis Basset his whole estate if he would take the name of Pendarves after his, Alexander's, death. This, Basset, justly proud of his own family name, declined to do; and hence no doubt the reason of Alexander's marriage with the young Mary Grenville. Their marriage life lasted only about seven years, and was not a particularly happy one. Soon after her husband's death Mrs. Pendarves married Dr. Delany, Dean of Down, to whom she seems to have been fondly attached; though he too was much her senior. To this charming and talented lady we are indebted for the following glance at the interior of Tehidy nearly 150 years ago, and for a portrait of the Basset of the period--Francis, grandfather of the first Lord de Dunstanville: