of herself: ‘I was a prude when young, and remarkably grave. It was owing to a consciousness that I could not pass unobserved, and a fear of giving offence or incurring censure. I loved dancing extremely, because I danced well.’ She loved it to the end of her days, and would dance with men whose grandfathers had been her partners in days of yore. Mrs. Cockburn also preferred men’s society to that of women. A company without a clever man in it was to her worse than no company at all. The sterling stuff that was in her is to be seen in what she curiously says of the early years of her marriage with young Cockburn, son of the Lord Justice Clerk: ‘I was married, properly speaking, to a man of seventy-five, my father-in-law. I lived with him four years, and as the ambition had seized me to make him fond of me, knowing also that nothing could please his son so much, I bestowed all my time and trouble to gain his approbation.’ Of her husband she wrote, three-and-thirty years after she had become a widow: ‘I was twenty years united to a lover and a friend.’ Perhaps it was the happiness of her own married life that gave her a decided partiality for making matches. ‘She was the _confidante_,’ her biographers remark, ‘of all lovesick hearts.’ When speaking of a widow ‘being consoled by one who had been longer in that state,’ Mrs. Cockburn contemptuously asked, ‘What’s a woman to a woman?’ That any woman should prefer a single to a married life was a fact she could not account for. ‘The girls are all set agog,’ she writes, ‘in seeking the ideal man, and will have none of God’s corrupted creatures.... Even as a good housewife I would choose my lord and master should have many faults, because there’s so much glory in mending them. One is prouder of darning an old table-cloth than of sewing a new one.’ The sentiment is happier than the simile. To the next sentiment universal mankind would say a loud Amen: ‘It’s a pity woman does not mend with age as wine does.’ There was a rough side to female Scottish character in those days. Among the friends of Mrs. Cockburn, when she was queen of Edinburgh society, was a Miss Suff Johnstone. She is thus sketched in ‘The Songstresses of Scotland,’ of whom Miss Suff was not one: ‘Miss Suff, before women’s rights were mooted, took the law into her own hand, and wore a man’s greatcoat, hat, and square-buckled shoes, practising, with the habiliments, a man’s habit of striding, spitting, and swearing. She shod a horse better than a smith, had a private forge in her bedroom, played on a fiddle, and sang a man’s song in a man’s bass voice.’ Gentle Anne Scott’s foot happening to tread upon the space appropriated by the Amazon, Anne was punished by a rough kick on the shins, and the fierce challenge, ‘What are ye wab-wabstering there for?’ The innocent offender was overwhelmed, and the rest of the party electrified. A contemporary of Mrs. Cockburn, Miss Jean Elliot, whose life ran between