too old to look out for new places of resort and to form new social habits. She was a very strange woman, whose character it would not be easy to describe, and who can only be perfectly understood from a knowledge and consideration of her habits and peculiarities. She was certainly clever, and she had acquired a great deal of information both from books and men, having passed her whole life amidst people remarkable for their abilities and knowledge. She cared very little for her children, but she sometimes pretended to care for them, and she also pretended to entertain strong feelings of friendship for many individuals; and this was not all insincerity, for, in fact, she did entertain them as strongly as her nature permitted. She was often capricious, tyrannical, and troublesome, liking to provoke, and disappoint, and thwart her acquaintances, and she was often obliging, good-natured, and considerate to the same people. To those who were ill and suffering, to whom she could show any personal kindness and attention, among her intimate friends, she never failed to do so. She was always intensely selfish, dreading solitude above everything, and eternally working to enlarge the circle of her society, and to retain all who ever came within it. She could not live alone for a single minute; she never was alone, and even in her moments of greatest grief it was not in solitude but in society that she sought her consolation. Her love and habit of domination were both unbounded, and they made her do strange and often unwarrantable things. None ever lived who assumed such privileges as Lady Holland, and the docility with which the world submitted to her vagaries was wonderful. Though she was eternally surrounded with clever people, there was no person of any position in the world, no matter how frivolous and foolish, whose acquaintance she was not eager to cultivate, and especially latterly she had a rage for knowing new people and going to fresh houses. Though often capricious and impertinent she was never out of temper, and she bore with good humour and calmness the indignant and resentful outbreaks which she sometimes provoked in others, and though she liked to have people at her orders and who would defer to her and obey her, she both liked and respected those who were not afraid of her and who treated her with spirit and freedom. Although she was known to be wholly destitute of religious opinions she never encouraged any irreligious talk in her house. She never herself spoke disrespectfully or with levity of any of the institutions or opinions which other people were accustomed to reverence, nor did she at any time, even during periods of the greatest political violence, suffer any disloyal language towards the sovereign, nor encourage any fierce philippics, still less any ribaldry against political opponents. It was her great object, while her society was naturally and inevitably of a particular political colour, to establish in it such a tone