Jervas was supposed to have been presumptuously and desperately in love with this beautiful woman, who died at the age of five-and-twenty: hence Pope has taken the liberty--by a poetical licence, no doubt--to call her, in his Epistle to Jervas, "_thy_ Bridgewater." Two of her fair sisters, the Duchess of Montagu and Lady Godolphin, hung near her; and above, her fairer sister, Lady Sunderland. Ascending the magnificent staircase, a hundred faces look down upon us, in a hundred different varieties of expression, in a hundred different costumes. Here are Queen Anne and Sarah Duchess of Marlborough placed amicably side by side, as in the days of their romantic friendship, when they conversed and corresponded as Mrs. Morley and Mrs. Freeman: the beauty, the intellect, the spirit, are all on the side of the imperious duchess; the poor queen looks like what she was, a good-natured fool. On the left is the cunning abigail, who supplanted the duchess in the favour of Queen Anne--Mrs. Masham. Proceeding along the gallery, we are met by the portrait of that angel-devil, Lady Shrewsbury,[72] whose exquisite beauty fascinates at once and shocks the eye like the gorgeous colours of an adder. I believe the story of her holding the Duke of Buckingham's horse while he shot her husband in a duel, has been disputed; but her attempt to assassinate Killegrew, while she sat by in her carriage,[73] is too true. So far had her depravities unsexed her! ----"Lorsque la vertu, avec peine abjurée, Nous fait voir une femme à ses fureurs livrée, S'irritant par l'effort que ce pas a couté, Son âme avec plus d'art a plus de cruauté." She was even less famous for the number of her lovers, than the catastrophes of which she was the cause. "Had ever nymph such reason to be glad? Two in a duel fell, and one ran mad." Not two, but half a dozen fell in duels; and if her lovers "ran mad," it was in despite, not in despair. Lady Shrewsbury is past jesting or satire; and after a first involuntary pause of admiration before her matchless beauty, we turn away with horror. For the rest of the portraits on this vast staircase, it would take a volume to give a _catalogue raisonnée_ of them. We pass, then, into a corridor hung with two large and very mediocre landscapes, representing Tivoli and Terni. Any attempt, even the best, to paint a cataract _must_ be abortive. How render to the fancy the two grandest of its features--sound and motion? the thunder and the tumult of the headlong waters? We will pass on to the gallery, and lose ourselves in its enchantments.