Eliza Dawson was born at Tadcaster in 1770, and came of good yeoman stock, from whom she inherited a steady-going Liberalism that equally avoided the extremes of “divine right” either of kings or mobs. The beauty and good nature of the girl attracted admiration even in her school days, and she had to reduce several worthy young men to temporary despair by the rejection of their proposals of marriage. Mr. Fletcher, who became her husband, was twenty years her senior, and fell in love with her because she realized his ideal of Sophia Western in “Tom Jones”! He was a well-known Edinburgh lawyer, and in her new home she met Scott, Jeffery, and Brougham. Later she made the acquaintance of Wordsworth, Southey, Arnold, Lafeyette, Mrs. Gaskell, Mazzini, Kossuth, and a variety of other distinguished persons. Her husband died in 1838, but she survived for thirty years. Her latter days were spent at Grasmere, where she died in 1858. The impression made by this gifted woman upon those with whom she came in contact is vividly shown by the description which Margaret Fuller has left of her. “Seventy-six years have passed over her head, only to prove in her the truth of my theory that we need never grow old. She was ‘brought up’ in the animated and intellectual circle of Edinburgh, in youth an apt disciple, in her prime a bright ornament of that society. She had been an only child, a cherished wife, an adored mother, unspoiled by love in any of these relations, because that love was founded on knowledge. In childhood she had warmly sympathised in the spirit that animated the American Revolution, and Washington had been her hero; later, the interest of her husband in every struggle for freedom had cherished her own. She had known in the course of her long life many eminent men, and sympathised now in the triumph of the people over the corn laws, as she had in the American victories, with as much ardour as when a girl, though with a wiser mind. Her eye was full of light, her manner and gesture of dignity; her voice rich, sonorous, and finely modulated; her tide of talk marked by candour and justice, showing in every sentence her ripe experience and her noble genial nature. Dear to memory will be the sight of her in the beautiful seclusion of her home among the mountains, a picturesque, flower-wreathed dwelling, where affection, tranquillity, and wisdom were the gods of the hearth to whom was offered no vain oblation. Grant us more such women, time! Grant to men to reverence, to seek for such!”