Produced by Anne Soulard, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team [Illustration: THE VISCOUNTESS ANSON] THE LETTER-BAG OF LADY ELIZABETH SPENCER-STANHOPE COMPILED FROM THE CANNON HALL PAPERS, 1806-1873 BY A. M. W. STIRLING TWO VOLUMES: VOLUME ONE "_TON_ IS INDEED A CAMELEON WHOSE HUE CHANGES WITH EVERY RAY OF LIGHT." _ALMACK'S_ TO CHARLES G. STIRLING THIS BOOK IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED PREFACE The following papers, which extend over a space of nearly seventy years during a most interesting period of our National History, may be said to form a sequel and a conclusion to two previous publications, _Coke of Norfolk and his Friends_, which appeared in 1906, and _Annals of a Yorkshire House_, which appeared in 1911. They are, however, more essentially a continuation of the latter, in which the Cannon Hall muniments and anecdotes were brought down to the years 1805-6, from which date the narrative is resumed in the present volume. In that first series of Papers which was published in the Annals, the bulk of the correspondence centred round the personality of Walter Spencer- Stanhope, M.P., who lived from 1749 to 1821. In the present series, the correspondence is principally addressed to or written by John Spencer- Stanhope, his son, who lived from 1787 to 1873. Other letters, doubtless, there were in plenty, to and from other members of the family, but only those have survived which found their way back to the old Yorkshire house whence so many of them had originally set forth with their messages of love and home tidings, and which were there preserved, eventually, by the grandmother of the present writer, Lady Elizabeth, wife of John Stanhope and daughter of the celebrated 'Coke of Norfolk.'