_February 8th._--Yesterday I went to see the unhappy Lady Beauvale, and, apart from the sorrow of witnessing so much bodily and mental suffering, it is really a singular and extraordinary case. Here is a woman thirty-two years old, and therefore in the prime of life, who has lost a husband of seventy-one deprived of the use of his limbs, and whom she had nursed for ten years, the period of their union, with the probable or possible fatal termination of his frequent attacks of gout constantly before her eyes, and she is not merely plunged in great grief at the loss she has sustained, but in a blank and hopeless despair, which in its moral and physical effects seriously menaces her own existence. She is calm, reasonable and docile, talks of him and his illness without any excitement, and is ready to do everything that her friends advise; but she is earnestly desirous to die, considers her sole business on earth as finished, and talks as if the prolongation of her own life could only be an unmitigated evil and intolerable burden, and that no ray of hope was left for her of any possibility of happiness or even peace and ease for the future. She is in fact brokenhearted, and that for a man old enough to be her grandfather and a martyr to disease and infirmity; but to her he was everything; she had consecrated her life to the preservation of his, and she kept his vital flame alive with the unwearied watching of a Vestal priestess. She had made him an object and an idol round which all the feelings and even passion of an affectionate heart had entwined themselves, till at last she had merged her very existence in his, and only lived in, with, and for him. She saw and felt that he enjoyed life, and she made it her object to promote and prolong this enjoyment. 'Why,' she says, 'could I not save him now, as I saved him heretofore?' and not having been able to do so, she regards her own life as utterly useless and unnecessary, and only hopes to be relieved of it that she may (as she believes and expects) be enabled to join him in some other world.[1] [Footnote 1: She lived, however, and married Lord Forester, _en secondes noces_, in 1856.]