This head of Hortense Mancini, as Cleopatra dissolving the pearl, is the most spirited, but the least beautiful portrait I have seen of her. An appropriate pendant on the opposite side is her lover, philosopher, and eulogist, the witty St. Evremond--Grammont's "Caton de Normandie;" but instead of looking like a good-natured epicurean, a man "who thought as he liked, and liked what he thought,"[78] his nose is here wrinkled up into an expression of the most supercilious scorn, adding to his native ugliness.[79] Both these are by Kneller. Farther on, is another of Charles's beauties, whose _sagesse_ has never been disputed--Elizabeth Wriothesley, Countess of Northumberland, the sister of that half saint, half heroine, and _all_ woman--Lady Russell. There is also a lovely picture of that magnificent brunette, Miss Bagot. "Elle avait," says Hamilton, "ce teint rembruni qui plait tant quand il plait." She married Berkeley Lord Falmouth, a man who, though unprincipled, seems to have loved her; at least, was not long enough her husband to forget to be her lover: he was killed, shortly after his marriage, in the battle of Southwold-bay. This is assuredly one of the most splendid pictures Lely ever painted; and it is, besides, full of character and interest. She holds a cannon-ball in her lap, (only an airy emblematical cannon-ball, for she poises it like a feather,) and the countenance is touched with a sweet expression of melancholy: hence it is plain that she sat for it soon after the death of her first husband, and before her marriage with the witty Earl of Dorset.--Near her hangs another fair piece of witchcraft, "La Belle Jennings," who in her day played with hearts as if they had been billiard balls; and no wonder, considering what _things_ she had to deal with:[80] there was a great difference between her vivacity and that of her vivacious sister, the Duchess of Marlborough.--Old Sarah hangs near her. One would think that Kneller, in spite, had watched the moment to take a characteristic likeness, and catch, not the Cynthia, but the Fury of the minute; as for instance, when she cut off her luxuriant tresses, so worshipped by her husband, and flung them in his face; for so she tosses back her disdainful head, and curls her lip like an insolent, pouting, spoiled, grown-up baby. The life of this woman is as fine a lesson on the emptiness of all worldly advantages, boundless wealth, power, fame, beauty, wit, as ever was set forth by moralist or divine. "By spirit robb'd of power--by warmth, of friends-- By wealth, of followers! without one distress, Sick of herself through very selfishness."[81] And yet I suspect that the Duchess of Marlborough has never met with justice. History knows her only as Marlborough's wife, an intriguing dame d'honneur, and a cast-off favourite. Vituperated by Swift, satirized by Pope, ridiculed by Walpole--what angel could have stood such bedaubing, and from such pens? "O she has fallen into a pit of ink!"