A more satisfactory and genial occupation, one would suppose, than wrangling for rights and sums of money which would soon be useless to her, might have occupied many of the Duchess’s declining days. In the month of September, previous to her death, she describes herself as having entered into a “new business,” which entertained her extremely; tying up great bundles of papers to assist very able historians to write a Life of the Duke of Marlborough, which would occupy two folios, with the Appendix. The arrangement of these papers seems to have afforded the Duchess considerable pleasure. Her feelings were rendered callous by age, and she could now peruse with a poignant regret the correspondence of her husband and of Godolphin. The Lord Treasurer, occupied and harassed as he always was, took no copies of his letters, but desired his friend to keep them, so that they had been carefully preserved, and amounted to two or three hundred in number. Such materials, together with the minute accounts of all continental affairs, would form, the Duchess felt assured, “the most charming history that had ever yet been writ in any country; and I would rather,” she adds, in a spirit with which all must sympathise, “if I were a man, have deserved to have such an account certified of me, as will be of the two lords that are mentioned, than have the greatest pension or estate settled upon me, that our own King, so full of justice and generosity, will give to reward the quick and great performances brought about by my Lord Carteret, and his partner the Earl of Bath.” With this reverence for the dead, and contempt for the living, the Duchess proceeded with her task; observing, (then in her eighty-fourth year,) “that it was not likely that she should live to see a history of thirty or forty years finished.”