macy with her, in her " Records of a Girlhood," describes an evening she passed at the Nortons :

A host of distinguished public and literary men were crowded into a small drawing-room which was literally resplendent with the light of Sheridan beauty, male and female. Mrs. Sheridan, the mother of the graces, more beautiful than anybody but her daughters; Lady Grahame, their beautiful aunt; Mrs. Norton, Mrs. Blackwood (Lady Dufferin), Georgina Sheridan (Duchess of Somerset and queen of beauty by universal consent), and Charles Sheridan, their younger brother, a sort of younger brother of the Apollo Belvedere. Certainly I never saw such a bunch of beautiful creatures all growing on one stem. I remarked it to Mrs. Norton, who looked complacently around her tiny drawing-room and said: "Yes, we are rather good-looking people." She was splendidly handsome, of an un-English character of beauty, her rather large and heavy head and features recalling the grandest Grecian and Italian models, to the latter of whom her rich coloring and blue-black braids of hair gave her an additional resemblance. Though neither as perfectly lovely as the Duchess of Somerset, nor as perfectly charming as Lady Dufferin, she produced a far more striking impression then either of them by the combination of the poetical genius with which she alone of all three was gifted with the brilliant wit and power of repartee which they possessed in common with her.

Mrs. Norton was born in 1808 and married Mr. Norton in 1827. After her separation she maintained herself by her pen. She was beautiful to the last, and in 1877, in her sixty-ninth year, she married Sir William Sterling Maxwell,

a distinguished Scotch baronet, who had long been devoted to her. She died a few weeks after marriage.

As an authoress Mrs. Norton was very popular. In reviewing a volume of her poems published in 1840 the Quarterly Review said:

This lady is the Byron of our modern poetesses. She has very much of that intense personal passion by which Byron's poetry is distinguished from the larger grasp and deeper communion with man and nature of Wordsworth. She has also Byron's beautiful intervals of tenderness, his strong, practical thought and forceful expression.

Mrs. Norton, indeed, contested the palm of popularity with Elizabeth Barrett (Mrs. Browning), and in the criticism of the day the two were compared and contrasted. Mrs. Browning's poetry has outlived Mrs. Norton's for the reason that it is not so directly personal to herself. Her ideals were higher, her themes of more universal interest.

Mrs. Norton had suffered much and she wrote on the oppression of her sex and was influential in bringing about some reform in respect to the right and property of married women. One of her principal poems is entitled "The Dream," which in some tenderly pathetic verse she dedicates to the Duchess of Sutherland.

The story is that of a mother watching over a lovely daughter sleeping. The daughter awakes and tells how she had dreamed of the bliss of first love and an early marriage, and how happy it made her. The mother becomes admonitory and describes the many accidents to which wedded happiness is liable, and exhorts to moderation of hope, for strife may come and many sorrows. There are many strong and passionate passages in the poem, particularly when the mother describes the anguish of heart in which the wife appeals to the husband.

Kneel, dash thyself upon the senseless ground,
Writhe as the worm writhes with dividing wound,
Invoke the heaven that knows thy sorrow's strength,
By all the softening memories of youth,

By every hope that cheered thine earlier day,
By every tear that washes wrath away,
By every old remembrance long gone by,
By every pang that makes thee yearn to die ;
And learn at length how deep and stern a blow
Man's hand can strike, and yet no pity show.

But there are many tender passages also in this poem. She describes the poor man returning to his humble cottage from his daily toil in lines of great felicity:

Still as his heart forestalls his weary pace,
Fondly he dreams of each familiar face,

Recalls the treasures of his narrow life,
His rosy children and his sunburnt wife,
To whom his coming is his chief event
Of simple days in cheerful labor spent,

For him they wait, for him they welcome home,
Fixed sentinels look forth to see him come;
The fagot sent for when the fire grew dim,
The frugal meal prepared, are all for him;
For him the watching of that sturdy boy,
For him those smiles of tenderness and joy,
For him--who plods his sauntering way along,
Whistling the fragment of some village song?

She is remembered now, however, by her minor poems and songs, such as "Love Not," "I Dream't But 'Twas a Dream," "The Fairy Bells," "Bingen on the Rhine," "We Have Been Friends Together," and "The Arab's Farewell to His Horse."

The heroine of George Meredith's brilliant novel, "Diana of the Crossways," has generally been supposed to have been drawn from Mrs. Norton. One of the principal incidents in that story is the betrayal of a cabinet secret to a newspaper. This was a charge once made against Lady Caroline, who, it was said, obtained a political secret from one of her admirers, who was a member of the ministry of Sir Robert Peel, and disclosed it to the editor of the Times.

Henry Reeve in his memoirs fully exculpates

Lady Caroline from this accusation, and it is now well settled that the so-called secret was obtained by the Times through a different channel.

Meredith has also disclaimed that Lady Caroline was the prototype of his heroine, but there are undoubted resemblances.