THE history of the late occupants of this beautiful little cottage is at variance with the censure of the poet’s Angelina on the quality of friendship. Lady Eleanor Butler, daughter of the Earl of Ormond, was born in Dublin, and almost from her cradle had been an orphan. Wealthy, beautiful, and nobly sprung, her hand was sought by persons of rank and fortune equal to her own; but to all addresses of that description she expressed at once her disinclination. Although she openly avowed this taste for independence, no woman was ever more distinguished for mildness, modesty, and all those feminine graces which adorn and give interest to the sex. Miss Ponsonby, a member of the noble family of Besborough, had been an early associate of Lady Eleanor; and, possibly, it may have contributed in some degree to cement their growing friendship, the incidental circumstance of both having been born in the same city, upon the same day and year, and being both bereaved of their parents at precisely the same period. Minds of so much sensibility soon mistook their fancies for realities, and rapidly concluding that they were destined for a life of independence, at the early age of seventeen vowed eternal friendship and devotion to each other for the residue of their lives. At the age of twenty-one, when the arm of the law rescued them from the friendly detention of their relatives, they withdrew to the solitary little cottage of Plas-Newydd, never to return again to the gay, glittering world of fashion, or the country which gave them birth. Having enlarged and decorated their rural dwelling, laid out and planted their grounds, the selection of a library became an early care. Here much time was spent; and the glowing language of Miss Seward, a friend and frequent guest at Plas-Newydd, bears a high testimony to the philosophic quality of their minds. “All that is grateful, all that is attached, will be ever warm from my heart towards each honoured and accomplished friend, whose virtues and talents diffuse intellectual sunshine that adorns and cheers the loveliest of the Cambrian vales.”—Letter 38. The habits and manners of the “Llangollen ladies” were frank and open, and their hospitality of the most liberal kind. They visited and received the neighbouring gentry until the “weight of years pressed heavy on them.” Madame de Genlis and the Mademoiselle D’Orleans, are to be numbered amongst their visiters; and it was here that intellectual being first heard the wild notes of our Æolian harp, of which she remarks, “it is natural for such an instrument to have originated in a country of storms and tempests, of which it softens the manners.”