and very jealous and spiteful; the rest remained always uncertain at most, like a similar scandal in our days, where I, for one, imagine love of seeming influence on one side, and love of lounging, of an easy house and a good dinner on the other, to be all the criminal passions concerned. However, I confess, [my mother] had that in herself which made her not ready to think the worst of her fellow-women. "Did you ever hear the history of John, Duke of Argyle's marriage, and constant attachment, before and after, to a woman not handsomer or much more elegant than Jeanie Deans, though very unlike her in understanding? I can give it you, if you {p.269} wish it, for it is at my fingers' ends. [I was so much the youngest of a numerous family that I had no playfellow, and for that reason listened with all my ears to the grown people's conversation, most especially when my mother and the friends of her youth got upon old stories; nor did I lose my taste for them when I grew old enough to converse with her on equal terms, and enquire into particulars.] Now I am [an] ancient [tabby] myself, I should be a great treasure of anecdote to anybody who had the same humor,--but I meet with few who have. They read vulgar tales in books, Wraxall, and so forth, what the footmen and maids only gave credit to at the moment, but they desire no farther information. I dare swear many of your readers never heard of the Duke of Argyle before. 'Pray, who was Sir Robert Walpole,' they ask me, 'and when did he live?'--or perhaps--'Was not the great Lord Chatham in Queen Anne's days?'[113] [Footnote 113: In 1827, Lady Louisa wrote for Caroline, Lady Scott, a great-granddaughter of the duke, _Some Account of John, Duke of Argyle, and his Family_. This delightful memoir was first printed (privately) in 1863. It was published in 1899, in _Selections from the Manuscripts of Lady Louisa Stuart_.]