"The vicissitudes of life have seldom produced a sadder or more rapid reverse than that by which the fortunes of this excellent lady were darkened and overthrown. Born to a noble inheritance which extended over a territory far exceeding the domain of many a reigning German prince, her name was known throughout the United Kingdom as that of "the Irish heiress." Five years ago her expectancy was considered to be equivalent, over and above all encumbrances and liabilities, to a yearly income of 5,000_l._ Before two years of the interval had elapsed she found herself at the head of her patrimonial estates, without a shilling that she could call her own. The failure of the potato crop, the famine and pestilence which followed, the scourging laws enacted and enforced by an ignorant Legislature to redress the calamity, and the claims of money-lenders, swept every inch of property from under her feet. Her hopes and her prospects were for ever blighted. Her projects for the improvement of the wild district over which she had reigned as a sort of native sovereign were at an end; and she went forth from the roof of her fathers as a wanderer, without a home, and, as it would almost appear, without a friend. Never was hard fate less deserved; for her untiring and active benevolence had been devoted from her childhood to the comfort and relief of those who suffered, and her powerful and original mind was incessantly employed in devising means of moral and physical amelioration in the condition of the tenantry on her father's estates. She gave up her whole time to such pursuits, avoiding the haunts of fashion and those amusements which might be considered suitable to her age and place, that she might perform the various duties of physician, almoner, schoolmistress, and agricultural instructor. Her almost daily habit was to visit the poor and the sick in the remote recesses of that wild region, sometimes on foot--more frequently in her little boat, well provided with medicaments and food, which she impelled by the vigor of her own arm through the lakes which stretch along the foot of the mountains. How grievous it is to reflect that she should so soon have been driven across the ocean in search of a place to lay her head. The American editor intimates that the object of her voyage was to collect materials for literary works. We have no doubt that such was among her projects; for she was a very distinguished writer, and would by no means eat the bread of idleness or dependence; but there is reason to believe that it was a more stringent compulsion which obliged her, at an advanced period of the year, and in a peculiarly delicate situation, when even peasants remain on shore, to encounter the tedium and perils of