JEFFREY.

Lady Mary Pierrepoint, eldest daughter of the Duke of Kingston, was born

in 1690, and gave, in her early youth, such indications of a studious

disposition, that she was initiated into the rudiments of the learned

languages along with her brother. Her first years appear to have been

spent in retirement, and yet her first letters indicate a great relish

for that talent and power of observation, by which she afterwards became

so famous and so formidable. These letters were addressed to Mrs

Wortley, the mother of her future husband, and, along with a good deal

of girlish flattery and affectation, display such a degree of easy

humour and sound penetration, as is not often to be met with in a damsel

of nineteen, even in this age of precocity. "My knight-errantry," she

says, "is at an end, and I believe I shall henceforth think freeing of

galley-slaves and knocking down windmills more laudable undertakings

than the defence of any woman's reputation whatever. To say truth, I

have never had any great esteem for the generality of the fair sex, and

my only consolation for being of that gender has been the assurance it

gave me of never being married to any one among them." But, in the

course of this correspondence with the mother, she appears to have

conceived a very favourable opinion of the son. Her ladyship, though

endowed with a very lively imagination, seems not to have been very

susceptible of violent or tender emotions, and to have imbibed a very

decided contempt for sentimental and romantic nonsense, at an age which

is commonly more indulgent.

Married to Mr Wortley in 1712, she entered upon a gay life; but she does

not appear to have been happy. We have no desire to revive forgotten

scandals, but it is a fact which cannot be omitted, that her ladyship

went abroad without her husband, on account of bad health, in 1739, and

did not return to England till she heard of his death in 1761. Whatever

was the cause of their separation, there was no open rupture, and she

seems to have corresponded with him very regularly for the first ten

years of her absence; but her letters were cold without being formal,

and were gloomy and constrained when compared with those that were

spontaneously written to show her wit or her affection to her

correspondents.

A little spoiled by flattery, and not altogether "undebauched by the

world," Lady Mary seems to have possessed a masculine solidity of

understanding, great liveliness of fancy, and such powers of observation

and discrimination of character, as to give her opinions great authority

on all the ordinary subjects of practical manners and conduct. After her

marriage, she seems to have abandoned all idea of laborious or regular

study, and to have been raised to the station of a literary character

merely by her vivacity and love of amusement and anecdote. The great

charm of her letters is certainly the extreme ease and facility with

which everything is expressed, the brevity and rapidity of her

representations, and the elegant simplicity of her diction. While they

unite almost all the qualities of a good style, there is nothing of the

professed author in them; nothing that seems to have been composed, or

to have engaged the admiration of the writer. She appears to be quite

unconscious either of merit or of exertion in what she is doing, and

never stops to bring out a thought, or to turn an expression, with the

cunning of a practised rhetorician. Her letters from Turkey will

probably continue to be more universally read than any of the others,

because the subject commands a wider and more permanent interest than

the personalities and unconnected remarks with which the rest of her

correspondence is filled. At the same time, the love of scandal and

private history is so great, that these letters will be highly relished

as long as the names they contain are remembered, and then they will

become curious and interesting, as exhibiting a truer picture of the

manners and fashions of the time, than is to be found in most other

publications.

Poetry, at least the polite and witty sort which Lady Mary has

attempted, is much more of an art than prose writing. We are trained to

the latter by the conversation of good society, but the former seems

always to require a good deal of patient labour and application. This

her ladyship appears to have disdained; and, accordingly, her poetry,

though abounding in lively conceptions, is already consigned to that

oblivion in which mediocrity is destined by an irrevocable sentence to

slumber till the end of the world. Her essays are extremely

insignificant, and have no other merit that we can discover, but that

they are very few and very short.

Of Lady Mary's friendship and subsequent rupture with Pope, we have not

thought it necessary to say anything, both because we are of opinion

that no new light has been latterly thrown upon it, and because we have

no desire to awaken forgotten scandals by so idle a controversy. Pope

was undoubtedly a flatterer, and was undoubtedly sufficiently irritable

and vindictive; but whether his rancour was stimulated upon this

occasion by anything but caprice or jealousy, and whether he was the

inventor or the echo of the imputations to which he has given notoriety,

we do not pretend to determine. Lady Mary's character was certainly

deficient in that cautious delicacy which is the best guardian of female

reputation; and there seems to have been in her conduct something of

that intrepidity which naturally gives rise to misconstruction, by

setting at defiance the maxims of ordinary discretion.

MADAME DU DEFFAND.

[BORN 1697. DIED 1780.]

JEFFREY.

A lady who was left a widow, with a moderate fortune and a great

reputation for wit, about 1750, and soon after gave up her hotel and

retired to apartments in the Convent de St Joseph, where she continued

to receive almost every evening whoever was most distinguished in Paris

for rank, talent, or accomplishment. Having become almost blind in a few

years, she found she required the attendance of some intelligent young

woman who might read and write for her, and assist in doing the honours

of her _conversazione_. For this purpose she cast her eyes on

Mademoiselle Lespinasse, the illegitimate daughter of a man of rank who

had been boarded in the same convent, and was for some time delighted

with her selection. By-and-by, however, she found that her young

companion began to engross more of the notice of her visitors than she

thought suitable, and parted from her with violent, ungenerous, and

implacable displeasure. Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, however, carried

with her the admiration of the greater part of her patroness's circle;

and having obtained a small pension from government, opened her own

doors to a society no less brilliant than that into which she had been

initiated by Madame du Deffand. The fatigue however, which she had

undergone in reading the old marchioness asleep had irreparably injured

her health, which was still more impaired by the agitations of her own

inflammable and ambitious spirit; and she died before she had attained

middle age, about 1776, leaving on the minds of all the most eminent men

of France, an impression of talent, and of ardour of imagination, which

seems to have been considered as without example. Madame du Deffand

continued to preside in her circle till a period of extreme old age, and

died in 1780, in full possession of her faculties.

Madame du Deffand was the wittiest, the most selfish, and the most

_ennuye_ of the whole party. Her wit, to be sure, is very enviable and

very entertaining; but it is really consolatory to common mortals to

find how little it could amuse its possessor. This did not proceed in

her, however, from the fastidiousness which is sometimes supposed to

arise from a long familiarity with excellence, so much as from a long

habit of selfishness, or rather from a radical want of heart or

affection. La Harpe says of her, that it was "difficult for any one to

have less sensibility and more egotism." With all this, she was greatly

given to gallantry in her youth, though her attachments, it would seem,

were of a kind not very likely to interfere with her peace of mind. The

very evening her first lover died, after an intimacy of twenty years, La

Harpe assures us "that she came to supper at a grand company at Madame

de Marchius's, where I was; and that, speaking of the loss she had

sustained, she said, 'Alas, he died at six o'clock, otherwise you would

not have seen me here.'" She is also recorded to have frequently

declared that she could never bring herself to love anything, though, in

order to take every possible chance, she had several times attempted to

become _devote_ with no great success. This, we have no doubt, is the

secret of her _ennui_; and a fine example it is of the utter

worthlessness of all talent, accomplishment, and glory, when

disconnected with those feelings of kindness and generosity which are of

themselves sufficient for happiness. Madame du Deffand, however, must

have been delightful to those who sought only for amusement. Her tone is

admirable, her wit flowing and natural; and though a little given to

detraction, and not a little importunate and _exigeante_ towards those

on whose complaisance she had claims, there is always an air of

politeness in her raillery, and of knowledge of the world in her

murmurs, that prevents them from being either wearisome or offensive.

PHOEBE BENTLEY.

[1700.]

CUMBERLAND.

The youngest daughter of the illustrious Dr Bentley was the Phoebe of

Byron's Pastoral. She was a woman of extraordinary accomplishments, and

was the mother of the well-known Richard Cumberland, the most valuable

part of whose early education was due to the taste and intelligence of

this excellent woman. "It was," according to his account, "in these

intervals from school that she began to form both my taste and my ear

for poetry, by employing me every evening to read to her, of which art

she was a very able mistress. Our readings were, with very few

exceptions, confined to the chosen plays of Shakespeare, whom she both

admired and understood in the true spirit and sense of the author. With

all her father's (Dr Bentley's) critical acumen, she could trace and

teach me to unravel all the meanders of Shakespeare's metaphors, and

point out where it illuminated or where it only loaded or obscured the

meaning."

These were happy hours and interesting lectures to Richard Cumberland;

and the effect was a sort of drama produced at twelve years, called

"Shakespeare in the Shades," and composed almost entirely of passages

from that great writer, strung together and assorted with no despicable

ingenuity.

MARQUISE DU CHATELET.

[BORN 1706. DIED 1749.]

PROFESSOR CRAIK.

At the head of the list of scientific ladies stands Gabrielle Emilie le

Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise du Chatelet, the French translator of

Newton's "Principia." She was the daughter of the Baron de Breteuil, was

born in 1706, and was married to the Marquis de Chastelet, or Chatelet,

when very young. Voltaire became acquainted with her in 1733, and he has

described what he found her to be in the memoir which he has left us of

a part of her life. Her father, he says, had caused her to be taught

Latin, and she knew that language as well as Madame Dacier. She had by

heart the finest passages of Horace, Virgil, and Lucretius; all the

philosophical writings of Cicero were familiar to her. But her

predominating taste was for the mathematics and metaphysics. There had

rarely been united in any one more correctness of judgment, with more

taste and ardour for the acquisition of knowledge; nor was she for all

this the less attached to the world, and to all the amusements proper to

her age and sex.

Yet she had given up everything to go and bury herself in an old

dilapidated chateau, situated in a barren and wretched country, on the

borders of Champagne and Lorraine. She had, however, made this country

house at Cirey an agreeable retreat for study and philosophical

intercourse. Pleasant gardens, with which the marchioness had

embellished it, a good collection of philosophical instruments which

Voltaire formed, and an extensive library, enabled Maupertius, John

Bernouilli, and other distinguished literary and scientific visitors,

who sometimes came to spend a few weeks or months, both to enjoy

themselves and to pass their time not unprofitably. Voltaire resided

here for about six years. He taught the marchioness English, and, he

says, at the end of three months she knew the language as well as

himself, and was equally able to read Locke, Newton, and Pope. Italian

she acquired with the same facility; Voltaire and she read several of

the Italian poets together; and when Francesco Algarotti came to Cirey

to finish his work, entitled "Newtonianismo par le Dame"--"Newtonianism

for the Ladies"--she was able to converse with him in his own tongue,

and to give him many valuable suggestions.

"We sought for nothing," continues Voltaire, "in this delicious retreat,

except to cultivate our understandings, without taking any trouble to

inform ourselves about what was passing in the rest of the world. Our

chief attention for a long time was given to Leibnitz and Newton. Madame

du Chatelet at first attached herself to Leibnitz, and gave an

explanation of a part of his system in a work written with great

ability, which she called 'Institutions de Physique.' She did not seek

to decorate this philosophy with ornaments foreign to its nature; no

such affectation belonged to the character of her mind, which was

masculine and true. Clearness, precision, and elegance were the

constituents of her style. If it has ever been found possible to give

any plausibility to the notions of Leibnitz, it is in that book that it

has been done." The "Institutions de Physique" has received high

commendation from the most competent authorities as well as from

Voltaire. It is described as "a series of letters, in which the systems

of Leibnitz and Newton are explained in a familiar style, and with a

degree of knowledge of the history of the several opinions, and of sound

language and ideas in their discussion, which we read with surprise,

remembering that they were the production of a Frenchwoman, thirty years

of age, written very few years after the introduction of the Newtonian

philosophy into France. She takes that intermediate view between the

refusal to admit the hypothesis of attraction and the assertion of it as

a primary quality of matter, from which very few who consider the

subject would now dissent. At the end of the work is an epistolary

discussion with M. de Mairan, on the principle of _vis viva_--the vital

energy, the metaphysical part of which then created much controversy."

Her translation of Newton's "Principia" was published at Paris in 1759.

It stands so high that it has been used by Delambre in his "History of

Astronomy," whenever he has to make a quotation from Newton. Madame du

Chatelet had been dead for ten years when the work appeared. Her life is

supposed to have been shortened by her close application in preparing

it, and she died at the age of forty-three.

LADY HUNTINGDON.

[BORN 1707. DIED 1791.]

ISAAC TAYLOR.

The broad facts of this noble lady's history afford ground enough for

the repute she has enjoyed as a woman of much tact and ability, of great

energy, and of a munificent temper; while the use she made of her

influence and fortune for the promotion of the Methodistic movement,

that is to say, of Christianity itself, sufficiently attests her piety

and zeal. It must also be inferred, from the circumstance of her having

retained the friendship and regard of many among the leading persons of

her time through a long period of years, that she possessed qualities of

mind and attractions of manner that were of no ordinary sort; for it is

certain that those who ridiculed, or even hated her Methodism, still

yielded themselves, in frequent instances, to her personal influence. So

far, an idea of Lady Huntingdon may be gathered from facts that are

beyond doubt. There is, however, so little that is discriminative in the

extant eulogies of her friends and correspondents, or of her

biographers, and there is so little that bears a clearly-marked

individuality in her own letters, that a distinct image of her mind and

temper is not easy to obtain.

As to the position assigned to her among the founders of Methodism, it

is due to her rather on the ground of what she did for it as its

patroness, which was almost immeasurable, than because she imprinted

upon it any characteristics of her own mind. Calvinistic Methodism was

not her creation. In the centre of the brilliant company of her pious

relatives and noble friends, and with a numerous attendance of educated

and Episcopally-ordained ministers, and, beyond this inner circle, a

broad _penumbra_ of lay preachers chosen by herself, and educated,

maintained, and employed at her cost, and acting under her immediate

direction, she seems to sit as a queen. Something of the regal style,

something of the air of the autocrat, was natural to one who, with the

consciousness of rank, and with the habitude of one accustomed to the

highest society, was gifted with a peculiar governing ability, and was

actually wielding an extensive influence over men and things. It would

have been wonderful indeed if nothing of the sort had been perceptible

in her manner and style; yet, that her main intention was pure and

beneficent, and that ambition was not her passion, will be felt and

confessed by every candid reader of her letters.

Her letters indicate much business-like ability, and they show always a

pertinent adherence to the matter in hand. They are, therefore, more

determinate by far than Whitefield's, and indeed are little less so than

Wesley's, whose letters are eminent examples of succinct

determinativeness; they bespeak an unvarying and genuine fervour, and a

simple-hearted onward tendency toward the one purpose of her life--the

spread of the gospel, and the honour of her Saviour. Lady Huntingdon's

are, moreover, marked by often-repeated, but not to be questioned,

professions of the deep sense she had of her own unworthiness and

unprofitableness. Such are the ingredients, few and perpetually

recurrent, of these compositions: a severe monotony--not severe in the

sense of harshness--is their characteristic. Yet Lady Huntingdon was

always the object of a warm personal affection with those who were

nearest to her. With them it is always "Our dear Lady Huntingdon;" and

putting out of view formal eulogies, it is unquestionable that, if she

governed her connection as having a right to rule it, her style and

behaviour, like Wesley's, indicated the purest motives and the most

entire simplicity of purpose. This, in truth, may be said to have been

the common characteristic of the founders of Methodism, especially of

the two Wesleys--a devotedness to the service and glory of the Saviour

Christ, which none who saw and conversed with them could question.

MARIA THERESA.

[BORN 1717. DIED 1780.]

CARLYLE.

Maria Theresa, in high spirits about her English subsidy and the bright

aspects, left Vienna for Presburg, and is celebrating her coronation

there as Queen of Hungary in a very sublime manner. Sunday, 25th June,

1741, that is the day of putting on your crown--iron crown of St

Stephen, as readers know. The chivalry of Hungary, from Palfy and

Esterhazy downward, and all the world, are there shining in loyalty and

barbaric gold and pearl. A truly beautiful young woman, beautiful to

soul and eye,--devout, too, and noble, though ill formed in political or

other science,--is in the middle of it, and makes the scene still more

noticeable to us. "See, at the finish of the ceremonies, she has mounted

a high swift horse, sword girt to her side,--a great rider always this

young queen,--and gallops, Hungary following like a comet's tail, to the

Konigsberg, to the top of the Konigsberg; there draws sword, and cuts

grandly, flourishing to the four quarters of the heavens: 'Let any

mortal, from whatever quarter coming, meddle with Hungary if he dare!'

Chivalrous Hungary bursts into passionate acclaim; old Palfy, I could

fancy, into tears; and all the world murmurs to itself, with moist

gleaming eyes, _Rex Noster_."

As for this brave young Queen of Hungary, my admiration goes with all

the world--not in the language of flattery, but of evident fact: the

royal qualities abound in that high young lady; had they left the world

and grown to mere costume elsewhere, you might find certain of them

again here. Most brave, high, and pious-minded; beautiful, too, as I

have said, and radiant with good nature, though of temper that will

easily catch fire; there is perhaps no nobler woman there living; and

she fronts the roaring elements in a truly grand feminine manner, as if

heaven itself, and the voice of duty, called her. "The inheritances

which my father left me, we will not part with these. Death, if it so

must be, but not dishonour; listen not to that thief in the night."

Maria Theresa has not studied at all the history of the Silesian

Duchies. She knows only that her father and grandfather peaceably held

them; it was not she that sent out Seckendorf to ride two thousand five

hundred miles, or broke the heart of Frederick-William and his

household. Pity she had not complied with Frederick, and saved such

rivers of bitterness to herself and mankind!

Her husband, the Grand Duke, an inert but good-tempered and

well-conditioned duke after his sort, goes with her. Him we shall see

trying various things, and at length take to banking and merchandise,

and even meal-dealing on the great scale. "Our armies had most part of

their meal circuitously from him," says Frederick of times long

subsequent. Now, as always, he follows loyally his wife's lead, never

she his. Wife being intrinsically, as well as extrinsically, the better

man, what other can he do?

At one time she seriously thought of taking "the command of her armies,"

says a good witness. "Her husband has been with the armies once, twice,

but never to much purpose; and this is about the last time, or last but

one, this in winter 1742. She loves her husband thoroughly all along,

but gives him no share in business, finding he understands nothing

except banking. It is certain she chiefly was the reformer of her army"

in years coming; "she athwart many impediments. An ardent rider, often

on horseback at paces furiously swift, her beautiful face tanned by the

weather. Honest to the bone, athwart all her prejudices. Since our own

Elizabeth, no woman, and hardly one man, is worth being named beside her

as a sovereign ruler. 'She is a living contradiction of the Salic law,'

say her admirers."

META MOLLER.

[1750.]

LETTERS.

Klopstock first beheld Meta Moeller in passing through Hamburg in April

1751. In a letter to one of his friends, written soon after this, he

describes her as mistress of the French, English, and Italian languages,

and even conversant with Greek and Latin literature. She was then in her

twenty-fourth year, he in his twenty-seventh. Their marriage took place

about three years afterwards. Here is Meta's own narrative of the rise

and course of their true love, given in one of her letters to

Richardson, a narrative which will bear a hundred readings, and a

hundred more after that, and still be as fresh and as touching as

ever:--