No person understood so well as Madame Pontchartrain the art of giving fetes. She had all the taste required, and all the invention, with a sumptuosity, too, on all sides; yet she never gave without reason and a good purpose, and she did all with an air perfectly simple and tranquil, without forgetting her age, her place, her state, her modesty. She was helpful to her relations; a trustworthy friend, effective, useful, true in all points, and pure at heart; delicious in the freedom of the country, dangerous at table in fixing you there, often very amusing without saying a word out of joint; always gay, though sometimes not exempt from humour. The virtue and the piety which she had exhibited throughout all her life increased as her fortune increased. What she gave in pensions well merited, what marriages she procured for poor girls, what she did for poor nuns when well assured of their vocation, what she deprived herself of to enable her to enable others to live, will never be known. ELIZABETH HALKETT. [1677.] CONOLLY. Born in 1677, the authoress of the celebrated ballad of "Hardyknute" was the second daughter of Sir Charles Halkett of Pitferrane. At the age of nineteen she married Sir Henry Wardlaw of Pitreavie in Fife, to whom she bore four daughters and a son. She at first attempted to pass off the ballad of "Hardyknute" as a genuine fragment of an ancient poem, and caused her brother-in-law, Sir John Bruce of Kinross, to communicate the manuscript to Lord Binning, himself a poet, as a copy of a manuscript found in an old vault of Dunfermline. The poem of "Hardyknute" was first published in 1719, and it was afterwards admitted by Ramsay into the "Evergreen," and for many years was received as an old ballad [a circumstance which has been founded on by some modern writers as sufficient to invalidate the claims of many of our "old ballads" to an origin beyond that of the date of Lady Halkett's successful literary fraud. Nay, several of these have been ascribed to this lady chiefly upon the internal evidence of identical words; but it seems to have been overlooked by these inquirers that Lady Halkett would naturally imitate the old ballads; and no doubt she did; so that the supposed proof may be successfully turned against the new theory.] The real authorship of "Hardyknute" was first disclosed by Bishop Percy in his "Reliques," published in 1755, and has since been established beyond a doubt [but there is no evidence beyond what has been mentioned that she wrote "Sir Patrick Spens," or any other of our so-called old Scotch ballads]. [Illustration: Drawn by J. Thurston. Engraved by W. Finden. LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGUE. From an enamel Miniature by Zink in the possession of Charles Colville Esqr.] LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU. [BORN 1690. DIED 1762.] JEFFREY.