She had the most excruciatingly ridiculous pride of birth and rank, and was vain of her personal appearance long after any such beauty as she ever possessed had fled. That beauty could only have been of complexion; for if her resemblance to her uncle, William Pitt, upon which she always insisted, was more than a fancy, her features must have been mean and insignificant. Pitt was the object of her whole-souled admiration, and the Pitt family--she was a Pitt on her mother’s side--she apparently considered to be above all the ordinary rules and restrictions of honour and probity which bind, or are supposed to bind, meaner mortals. Her physician tells us that she had on an occasion asked him if such an one ought not to act in a certain way. ‘Undoubtedly,’ said he; ‘a person of principle would not act otherwise.’ ‘Principle!’ she exclaimed. ‘What do you mean by principle? I am a Pitt!’ Nothing was impossible after this. But it seems likely that this, like most of her sayings and doings, was merely a pose, meant to attract attention and make her notorious. It was doubtless to the same end that she professed to dabble in magic and astrology, and that she affected a belief in the proximate coming of the Messiah. Awaiting His arrival, she kept two Arabian mares constantly saddled which had never been ridden, and these mares had each a special attendant whose business was to keep everything ready for the celestial visitor, who should ride thence in triumph to Jerusalem with Lady Hester Stanhope as a kind of lady-guide! And so to end this galaxy of shining lights in the whole art and mystery of shrewishness and termagancy. Many more there be, but these are the most notorious of that unblessed company. Turn we now to the unhappy marriages of men of genius, whose careers in literature and art are public property. The instances are so numerous in which men of genius or great mental activity have embittered their lives by marriages which have proved fruitful of discord and strife, that the proposition, ‘Should Genius be mated?’ might well be negatived in discussion.