She was extremely sensitive in regard to her age, and if forced to state it on the witness-stand would doubtless have whispered it to the judge in a bewitching way, as did a pretty but slightly _passe_ French actress under similar embarrassing circumstances. She pleads: "What has a woman to do with dates--cold, false, erroneous, chronological dates--new style, old style, precession of the equinox, ill-timed calculation of comets long since due at their station and never come? Her poetical idiosyncrasy, calculated by epochs, would make the most natural points of reference in woman's autobiography. Plutarch sets the example of dropping dates in favor of incidents; and an authority more appropriate, Madame de Genlis, who began her own memoirs at eighty, swept through nearly an age of incident and revolution without any reference to vulgar eras signifying nothing (the times themselves out of joint), testifying to the pleasant incidents she recounts and the changes she witnessed. _I_ mean to have none of them!" Sydney Owenson was born in "ancient ould Dublin" at Christmas: the year is a little uncertain. The encyclopaedias say about 1780: 1776 has been suggested as more correct, but we will not pry into so delicate a matter. A charming woman never loses her youth. Doctor Holmes tells us that in travelling over the isthmus of life we do not ride in a private carriage, but in an omnibus--meaning that our ancestors or their traits take the trip with us; and in studying a character it is interesting to note the combinations that from generations back make up the individual. Sydney's father was the child of an ill-assorted marriage. "At a hurling-match long ago the Queen of Beauty, Sydney, granddaughter of Sir Maltby Crofton, lost her heart, like Rosalind, to the victor of the day, Walter McOwen (anglicized Owenson), a young farmer, tall and handsome, graceful and daring, and allowed him to discover that he had 'wrestled well and overthrown more than his enemies.' Result, an elopement and mesalliance never to be forgiven--the husband a jolly, racketing Irish lad, unable to appreciate his high-toned, accomplished wife, a skilful performer on the Irish harp, a poetess and a genius, called by the admiring neighbors 'the Harp of the Valley.'" Their only child, the father of Lady Morgan, was a tolerable actor, of loose morals and tight purse, who could sing a good song or tell a good story, and who was always in debt.