These sound, perhaps, like mere civil speeches, but they came from one who always spoke sincerely, and who was no common person. Mrs. Hungerford was, by those who did not know her, thought proud; those who did, knew that she had reason to be proud. She was of noble descent, dignified appearance, polite manners, strong understanding, and high character. Her fortune, connexions, various knowledge, and extraordinary merit, had, during a long life, given her means of becoming acquainted with most of the persons of any celebrity or worth in her own or in foreign countries. No new candidate for fame appeared in any line of life, without desiring to be noticed by Mrs. Hungerford; no traveller of distinction or of literature visited England without providing himself with letters of introduction to Mrs. Hungerford, and to her accomplished daughter, the wife of Admiral Mortimer. In her early youth she had passed some years abroad, and had the vivacity, ease, polish, _tact_, and _esprit de société_ of a Frenchwoman, with the solidity of understanding, amiable qualities, domestic tastes, and virtues of an Englishwoman. The mutual affection of this mother and daughter not only secured their own happiness, but diffused an additional charm over their manners, and increased the interest which they otherwise inspired. Mrs. Mortimer’s house in London was the resort of the best company, in the best sense of the word: it was not that dull, dismal, unnatural thing, an English _conversazione_, where people are set, against their will and their nature, to talk wit; or reduced, against their pride and their conscience, to worship _idols_. This society partook of the nature of the best English and the best French society, judiciously combined: the French mixture of persons of talents and of rank, men of literature and of the world; the French habit of mingling feminine and masculine subjects of conversation, instead of separating the sexes, far as the confines of their prison-room will allow, into hostile parties, dooming one sex to politics, argument, and eternal sense, the other to scandal, dress, and eternal nonsense. Yet with these French manners there were English morals; with this French ease, gaiety, and politeness, English sincerity, confidence, and safety: no _simagrée_, no _espionnage_; no intrigue, political or gallant; none of that profligacy, which not only disgraced, but destroyed the _reality_ of pleasure in Parisian society, at its most brilliant era. The persons of whom Mrs. Mortimer’s society was formed were, in their habits and good sense, so thoroughly English, that, even had it been possible for them to put morality and religion out of the question, they would still have thought it quite as convenient and agreeable to love their own husbands and wives as to play at cross-purposes in gallanting their neighbours’. Of consequence, Mrs. Mortimer, in the bloom of youth and height of fashion, instead of being