This amiable and beloved wife died after a union of five or six years, and left her husband broken-hearted. Her sweetness and loveliness, and the general sympathy caused by her death, drew a touch of deep feeling from the pen of Swift, who mentions the event in his journal to Stella: every one, he says, grieved for her husband, "they were so happy together." Poor Parnell did not, in his bereavement, try Lord Lyttelton's specifics: he did not write an elegy, nor a monody, nor did he marry again;--and, unfortunately for himself, he could not subdue his mind to religious resignation. His grief and his nervous irritability proved too much for his reason: he felt what all have felt under the influence of piercing anguish,--a dread, a horror of being left alone: he flew to society; when that was not at hand, he sought relief from excesses which his constitution would not bear, and died, unhappy man! in the prime of life; "a martyr," as Goldsmith tells us, "to conjugal fidelity." FOOTNOTES: [64] See his Poems. [65] Johnson's Life of Lord Lyttelton. [66] See in his Poems,--the lines beginning On Thames's banks a gentle youth For Lucy sighed with matchless truth, And Your shape, your lips, your eyes are still the same. [67] Her son was that eccentric and profligate Lord Lyttelton, whose supernatural death-bed horrors have been the subject of so much speculation. He left no children. The present Earl of Mountnorris, (so distinguished for his Oriental travels when Lord Valentia,) is the grandson of Lucy Fortescue. [68] Lord Lyttelton's Works, 4to. [69] Born in Dublin, 1679; died 1717. CHAPTER X. CONJUGAL POETRY CONTINUED. KLOPSTOCK AND META.