In reviewing the long life whose annals we have written, it is not easy to point out the benefits which the Duchess conferred upon society. Endowed with natural abilities of a very uncommon order; with a person so remarkably beautiful, that it would have bestowed a species of distinction upon a female in a humble station; possessing a most vigorous constitution, which seemed destined to wear out, with impatience, her heirs and her enemies; raised to rank, her coffers overflowing with wealth; she appeared marked out by destiny to effect some signal good for a country in whose concerns she took an active part. What distress might she not, with her enormous wealth, have relieved; what indigent genius might she not have brought forth to light; what aids to learning by endowments might she not have bestowed; what colleges might she not have assisted; what asylums for the miserable might she not have provided! Of these laudable undertakings, of intentions so beneficent, we find, compared with her enormous means, but few instances. There are some laudable endowments, some impulses of benevolence recorded, which make one hope that there may have been more, unseen, unknown. But a truly amiable mind would not have been solely occupied by what she deemed her claims and her wrongs; it would, when the fervour of the noon-day was over, have delighted in those kind acts which cheer the evening of life. To the last she was grasping, accumulating, arranging. To the world, in its worst sense, she gave up the powers of a mind destined for higher things. The immense accumulation of her wealth spoke volumes against the extension of her charity. To each of her heirs, Charles Duke of Marlborough, and to his brother, Lord John Spencer, she bequeathed a property of thirty thousand a year, besides bequests to others, particularly enumerated in her singular will.[411]