On another occasion, Miss Ambrose being present when the freedom of the corporation of Drogheda was presented to the viceroy in a gold box of exquisite workmanship, she laughingly asked him to give it to her. "Madame," said Chesterfield, "you have too much of my freedom already." The lady eventually married a county Mayo gentleman of large fortune named Palmer, and lived to the age of ninety-eight, forming a connecting link between two very distant periods. In her extreme old age Sheil paid her a visit, the admiration which Lord Chesterfield was known to entertain for her having induced him to seek an introduction to her. Although rich, he found her occupying a small lodging in Henry street, where she lived secluded and alone. "Over the chimney-piece of the front drawing-room was suspended the picture of her Platonic idolater. It was a half-length portrait, and had been given her by the man of whose adoration she was so virtuously vain." While Sheil was striving to image to himself the fascinations of the "dangerous Papist," the door was opened: a volume of smoke had previously filled the room, and the rush of air causing it to spread in huge wreaths around her, "a weird and withered form stood in the midst of the dispersing vapor." Lady Palmer was a most vehement Catholic. Lord Chesterfield and the Catholic question were the only subjects in which she seemed to take any interest. On the wrongs of her country she expatiated with both energy and eloquence, but when her visitor remarked that he was not surprised at Lord Chesterfield's having called her "a dangerous Papist," the patriot relapsed into the woman, and she looked up at the picture with a melancholy smile. The subject of society in Ireland during the eighteenth century would be singularly incomplete without some notice of the disabilities under which so large a portion of the nation lay. The penal laws were designed to transfer all the property of the country to the hands of Protestants, and they were effectual to a great extent, but in many instances they were evaded by the friendship and good feeling of Protestants themselves. Intermarriages often took place, and individuals of the favored party in several cases held property secretly in trust for the real owners. By this and other devices a portion of their estates was saved for Catholic families. It may not be amiss to relate two or three illustrations of the working of these laws, and also of the way in which they were evaded.