widest spread and most terrific upheaval Europe had known since the downfall of the Roman Empire. To have been thirty years of age in that year of years, 1848! Those who witnessed the great drama must have felt that to have come into the world more than three decades before would have been a mistake the most grievous. Among the children fortunate enough, then, to be born when the nineteenth century was in its eighteenth year was the heroine of our history. Limerick, the city of the broken treaty, was her birthplace, Maria Dolores Eliza Rosanna the names bestowed upon her in baptism. Only a year before (on 3rd July 1817) her father, Edward Gilbert, had been gazetted an ensign in the old 25th regiment of the line, now the King's Own Scottish Borderers. He may have been, as his daughter and only child afterwards claimed, the scion of a knightly house, but he could boast a far more honourable distinction--that he rose from the ranks and earned his commission by valour and good conduct in the long Napoleonic wars.[1] Promotion it was, perhaps, that emboldened him to marry in the same year. His wife was a girl of surpassing beauty, a Miss Oliver, of Castle Oliver, wherever that may be, and a descendant of the Count de Montalvo, a Spanish grandee, who had lost his immense estates in the wars. The ancestors of this unfortunate noble (we are told) were Moors, and came into Spain in the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, which was certainly the worst possible moment they could have chosen for so doing. For this account of Mrs. Gilbert's ancestry we are indebted to her daughter, whose names certainly suggest a Spanish origin. It was by her mournful second name, or rather by its lightsome diminutive, Lola, that she was ever afterwards known. Perhaps she was so called in remembrance of one of the proud Montalvos. At all events, she never ceased to cherish the belief in her half-Spanish blood. When she was a romantic young girl--for young girls _were_ romantic seventy years ago--Spain obsessed the Byronic caste of mind. It was regarded as the home of chivalry, romance, love, poetry, and adventure. To be ever so little Spanish was accounted a most enviable distinction. So it would be ungenerous of us to impugn Lola's claim to what she and her contemporaries considered an inestimable privilege. True or false, the idea was one she imbibed with her mother's milk--though I forgot to say that, according to her own statement, she was nourished at this early period by an Irish nurse. I wish I could say in what religion the new daughter of the regiment was educated. Somewhere she says that her mother eloped with her father from a convent. The strong dislike she manifested in after years for the Roman Catholic Church may have been inspired by this circumstance, and suggests, at any rate, in one not keenly sensible of nice theological distinctions, some personal motive arising from a bitter experience.