fashionable whims. Lady Kildare said she would ‘offer Rousseau an elegant retreat, if he would educate her children.’ I own I differ widely with her ladyship, and would rather commit that charge to a downright honest person. I mean as far as religious principles; but perhaps that was a part that did not enter into her schemes at all.” When the Duchess, as she then was, startled her friends by her second marriage to Mr. Ogilvie, Mrs. Delany’s observations on the event were in the worst possible taste. After a little tilt at her as “one of the proudest and most expensive women in the world,” this typical Mrs. John Bull, with all the unctuous priggishness and fondness for innuendo of her class, quotes a horrid jest of Lady Brown’s, and proceeds to bestow her quite uncalled-for pity on the Duchess’s “poor children.” It is easy to suppose that our charming and clever Lady Kildare found herself bored to death with Mrs. Delany, and her hideous shell-work, and the other atrocities on which she lavished her time (with the profound conviction that she was setting an example for all womanhood), and that she committed the unforgivable offence of avoiding her as much as she could. At the Coronation of King George III, in September, 1761, our Countess, then the mother of ten children, walked in the procession of the peeresses and, according to Horace Walpole’s account of the proceedings to Hon. H. S. Conway, was with her sister-in-law, the Duchess of Richmond, and Lady Pembroke, “the chief beauties.” To the Countess of Ailesbury he compares this trio to “the Graces.” To George Montagu he speaks of “Lady Kildare, still beauty itself, if not a little too large.” It is clear that her Ladyship’s beauty was not the transient thing which passed with the passing of youth. She was forty-eight when Sir Joshua Reynolds painted the portrait of her, which is still in Kilkee Castle. “What a beautiful head!” cried Edmund Burke in a rapture of admiration, when he saw the portrait in his friend’s studio. “Sir Joshua with much feeling replied: ‘It does not please me yet; there is a sweetness of expression in the original which I have not been able to give to the portrait, and therefore cannot think it finished.’” In 1766 the Earl, who had been made to suffer as much as the administration dared for the bold stand he had taken in Irish politics, received at last the “_pinchbeck dukedom_” which had been promised him nearly twenty years ago. Government was as kind to him now, as it had been averse to him before; and lucrative offices were offered him in quick succession. But death took him from the midst of his splendour, and one November day in the year 1773 he was carried from the beautiful home he had built for himself in Leinster House to the family vault in Christ Church, where his ashes await the resurrection.