That white cockade, the symbol of a cause so full of poetry and romance, seems to have brought a benison with it to the babe Rosemary Dacre, to have dowered her with beauty, and gifted her with an unusually magnetic attractiveness. As she grew into fairest womanhood she had many lovers, declared and undeclared, and in the hearts of those who failed to win the lady her memory seems to have lingered tenderly with no touch of bitterness; to have been, to some of them, a kind of lifelong inspiration, evoking gentle wistful feelings, such as Dante Rossetti has so exquisitely recorded in one of the finest of his earlier poems, his “First Love Remembered.” Some curious records, some strange hints of the potent part which the lady of the white cockade, and the memory of her, played in the lives of certain men whom she never wedded are preserved at Penicuik, casketed in the dainty little Chippendale workbox that once was hers, among other personal relics,—her long black gloves, with a space of black lace inlet from palm to top; her cap edged with delicate lace; a long tress of her dark brown hair, marked “June the 6th, 1794, aged 48”; and her silhouette, cut in black paper, showing a strong dignified profile, beneath a tall hat, wound round with a veil. Two of the interesting letters preserved in this quaint old workbox are from Lord Chancellor Eldon, who in his youth, as they clearly indicate, had been a lover of Rosemary Dacre; though the impression can hardly have been overwhelmingly deep or very permanent, for he was only twenty-one when he eloped with Bessy Surtees, a step which entailed the loss of his Oxford fellowship, closed his hopes of preferment in the Church, and obliged him with “a most kind Providence for my guide,” as he says, to take to the study of law, one of his earliest legal efforts being the delivery, as Deputy-Vinerian Professor for Sir Robert Chambers, of a lecture on “the statute of young men running away with maidens.” But in his youth the future Lord Chancellor was, as he used to confess, “very susceptible.” “Oh,” he would say, “these were happy days; we were always in love then.” The first letter of the old man of nearly eighty runs as follows:— “_14 April 1829._ “DEAR MARY DACRE,—Pardon my use of a name, which belonged to you when I first knew you. I can sincerely assure you that I have often, often thought of the person who bore that name when I knew her, with, may I say, sentiments of most sincere affection? If I had been Lord Stowell, her name now might neither have been Molly Dacre, nor Mary, Lady Clarke. “Thank you a thousand Times, thank you for your Letter, which I have this moment received. I would thank you more at large if I could delay in an hour, in which I am much engaged, to thank you, but that I cannot persuade myself to do.