She was undoubtedly a clever woman, witty, and with some learning; but all her doings were eccentric and fantastical beyond measure, and tinctured strongly with hereditary madness. For her father was something more than strange in his doings. He, too, had gifts, but they were overlaid by a singular species of mental alienation. He was a furious Republican, and it is related of him that, in accordance with those principles, he caused his armorial bearings to be obliterated from his plate, his carriages, and from everything he possessed. He halted only before the destruction of the iron gates of his house at Chevening: having removed even the magnificent tapestry given to his ancestor, the great Stanhope, by the King of Spain, for the reason that it was (to quote himself) ‘damned aristocratical.’ He sold all his Spanish plate, weighing six hundredweight, for the same whim, and was used to sleep at once with twelve blankets over him and his bedroom window wide open. [Illustration: LADY HESTER STANHOPE. ] Two of a kind rarely agree together, and so it is not surprising to find that Lady Hester Stanhope felt her father’s society insupportable. She left home and went to reside with her grandmother, the dowager Lady Chatham, in Somersetshire; afterwards going to keep house for her uncle, William Pitt, in his retirement at Walmer. A year later, he became again Prime Minister, and she, acting as one of his assistant private secretaries, moved for a time in the centre of political and social turmoil. But when Pitt died, broken-hearted at the news of Napoleon’s victory of Austerlitz, his niece suddenly lost the prestige that had given her a factitious importance, and was fain to retire to the obscurity of Montagu Square, where for a time she kept house for her two half-brothers who both held commissions in the army. War breaking out, her occupation was gone, and, after a short retirement to Builth, she set out upon some extraordinary escapades in travelling which finally landed her in Syria, where she lived until 1839 in a rambling house--half monastery, half palace--on the slopes of Mount Lebanon, intriguing with or against the Porte, and the petty Sheiks and Emirs of the surrounding country. She was in receipt of a Government pension of 1200_l._ a year for a very long period, and had considerable wealth besides, until her reckless extravagance dissipated all and brought her not only to poverty, but in debt to the amount of 40,000_l._ She kept up a considerable household in her seclusion upon Mount Lebanon, and retained a physician all to herself. Certainly she never paid him anything, but he seems to have taken it out in a kind of posthumous vilification, acting as the Boswell to her Johnson, and publishing, some years after her death, three volumes of memoirs, correspondence, and conversations. He was a poor, invertebrate sort of a creature, this physician, who was content to stay beside a