So we picture for ourselves Elizabeth Mason on that summer morning of the year 1760 when she set forth, a charming and accomplished girl of twenty, from the home of her father, James Mason, Esq., of Ballydowney, Killarney, for the memorable visit to Cork, which was to prove an event of such transcendent importance in her life. We guess something of the hopes and dreams, which lay in James and Catherine Mason’s mind when they yielded to the desires of their son, James (who was a successful business man in Cork), and allowed their only daughter, Elizabeth, to accompany him, on his return to Cork from one of his visits home, for “a season” in the gay, little Southern Capital. Among the country gentlemen of the neighbourhood there was small likelihood of finding a suitable _parti_ for their beautiful girl. Arthur O’Neill’s description of Lord Kenmare’s “Milesian Assembly,” which took place in this identical year,[6] seems to point to a society around Killarney of hard-riding, hard-drinking, jolly squires with few of whom Elizabeth’s cultured and thoughtful mind would have enough in common for the prospects of a very happy marriage. Amid the young professional and business men in Cork, with their more intellectual interests, the wider knowledge of life which their close and frequent intercourse with the Continent fostered, their greater accessibility to new ideas, she was, as her prudent, loving parents probably realised, much more likely to find a husband calculated to make her happy. Extraordinarily gifted by nature, her education had been such as to foster her birthgifts. Her great-grandson, Dr. Thomas Addis Emmet, of New York, who in his book, “The Emmet Family,” has done us the great service of making us acquainted with the _choses intimes_ of his illustrious stock, has published many of her letters, and they bear out Dr. Madden’s verdict on her “as an amiable, exemplary, high-minded lady, whose understanding was as vigorous as her maternal feelings were strong and ardent.” In another place Madden speaks of her “noble disposition and vigorous understanding,” and in conversation with Dr. Thos. Addis Emmet in 1880 he stated that he considered that she, her husband, her three sons, Christopher Temple, Thomas Addis, Robert, and her daughter, Mary Anne (wife of Robert Holmes) “were the most talented family in every respect he had ever known of.” It was felt, indeed, and not alone by those who hold that “all distinguished men inherit their characteristics rather from the mother than from the father,” that the extraordinary brilliancy of the three sons of Dr. and Mrs. Emmet was largely an inheritance from their mother. And it is impossible to read her letters, with their exquisite precision and felicity of phrase, their ease, and candour and absence of all straining after effect, their expression of a philosophy of life, the noblest, and soundest (because founded on the truest Christian principles) without feeling that they