attached to her, and for a long time was devoted to her society. She was pleased and flattered by his devotion, but as she did not in the slightest degree return his passion, though she admired his abilities; he at last came to resent her indifference, and ended by estranging himself from her entirely, and proved the strength of his feeling by his obstinate refusal to continue even his acquaintance with her. Her other admirer was Charles Buller, with whom she was extremely intimate, but without ever reciprocating his love. Curiously enough, they were very like each other in person, as well as in their mental accomplishments. They had both the same spirits and cleverness in conversation, and the same quickness and drollery in repartee. I remember Allen well describing them, when he said that their talk was like that in the polite conversation between Never Out and Miss Notable. Her faults appeared to be caprice and a disposition to quarrels and tracasseries about nothing, which, however common amongst ordinary women, were unworthy of her superior understanding. But during her last illness all that was bad and hard in her nature seemed to be improved and softened, and she became full of charity, good-will, and the milk of human kindness.

Charles Greville

Lady Ashburton's Sayings

HOW fortunate that I am not married to King Leopold ! He said to his French wife, "Pas de propos légers." I suppose he meant "No jokes." Now I like nothing else I should wish to be accountable for nothing I said, and to contradict myself every minute.

It is dreadful for me to have no domestic duties, I

always envy the German women. I am a "cuisinière incomprise."

I always feel a kind of average between myself and any other person I am talking with-between us two, I mean so that when I am talking to Spedding-I am unutterably foolish-beyond permission.

I like you to say the civil things, and then I can do the contrary.

In one's youth one doubts whether one has a body, and when one gets old whether one has a soul; but the body asserts itself so much the stronger of the two.

I have not only never written a book, but I know nobody whose book I should like to have written.

I remember when a child telling everybody I was present at mamma's marriage. I was whipped for it, but I believed it all the same.

When I am with High-Church people, my opposition to them makes me feel no church at all-hardly bare walls with doors and windows.

I forget everything, except injuries.

I should like exactly to know the difference between money and morality.

I have no objection to the canvas of a man's mind being good if it is entirely hidden under the worsted and floss, and so on.

Public men in England are so fenced in by the cactus-hedge of petty conventionality which they call practical life, that everything good and humane is invisible to them. Add to this the absence of humour, and you see all their wretchedness. I have never known but two men above this-Buller and Peel.

A bore cannot be a good man: for the better a man is, the greater bore he will be, and the more hateful he will make goodness.

I am sure you find nine persons out of ten, what at first you assume them to be.

When one sees what marriage generally is, I quite wonder that women do not give up the profession.

Your notion of a wife is evidently a Strasbourg goose whom you will always find by the fireside when you come home from amusing yourself.

Of course there will be slavery in the world as long as there is a black and a white-a man and a woman.

I am strongly in favour of Polygamy.

I should like to go out, and the other wife to stay at home and take care of things, and hear all I had to tell her when I came back.

looks all a woman wants-strength and cruelty. The most dreadful thing against women is the character of the men that praise them.

I like men to be men; you cannot get round them without.

Friendship has no doubt great advantages; you know a man so much better and can laugh at him so much

more.

If I were to begin life again, I would go on the turf, merely to get friends: they seem to me the only people who really hold close together. I don't know why: it may be that each man knows something that might hang the other; but the effect is delightful and most peculiar.

I never want friends if I have sun-or at most one who does not speak.

To have a really agreeable house, you must be divorced; you would then have the pleasantest men, and no women but those who are really affectionate and interested about you, and who are kept in continual good-humour by the consciousness of a benevolent

patronage. I often think of divorcing myself from B. B. and marrying him again.

There is no rebound about her: it is like talking into a soft surface.

English society is destroyed by domestic life out of place. You meet eight people at dinner-four couples, each of whom sees as much as they wish of one another elsewhere, and each member of which is embarrassed and afraid in the other's presence.

Staff Nurse: Old Style

Lord Houghton

'HE greater masters of the commonplace,

TH

REMBRANDT and good SIR WALTER-only these

Could paint her all to you: experienced ease,
And antique liveliness, and ponderous grace;
The sweet old roses of her sunken face;
The depth and malice of her sly gray eyes;

The broad Scots tongue that flatters, scolds, defies;
The thick Scots wit that fells you like a mace.
These thirty years she has been nursing here,
Some of them under SYME, her hero still.

Much is she worth, and even more is made of her.
Patients and students hold her very dear.

The doctors love her, tease her, use her skill.
"The Chief" himself is half-afraid of her.
W. E. Henley

They say

Staff Nurse: New Style

BLUE-E

LUE-EYED and bright of face, but waning fast
Into the sere of virginal decay

I view her as she enters, day by day,

As a sweet sunset almost overpast.

Kindly and calm, patrician to the last,
Superbly falls her gown of sober gray,
And on her chignon's elegant array

The plainest cap is somehow touched with caste.
She talks BEETHOVEN, frowns disapprobation

At BALZAC's name, sighs it at "poor GEORGE Sand's";
Knows that she has exceeding pretty hands;
Speaks Latin with a right accentuation;
And gives at need (as one who understands)
Draught, counsel, diagnosis, exhortation.

W. E. Henley

Mrs. Grote

MRS.

RS. GROTE, wife of George Grote, the banker, member of Parliament, and historian of Greece, was one of the cleverest and most eccentric women in the London Society of my time. No worse a judge than De Tocqueville pronounced her the cleverest woman of his acquaintance; and she was certainly a very remarkable member of the circle of remarkable men among whom she was living, when I first knew her. At that time she was the female centre of the Radical party in politics—a sort of not-young-or-handsome feminine oracle, among a set of very clever halfheathenish men, in whose drawing-room, Sydney Smith used to say, he always expected to find an altar to Zeus.

...

Mrs. Grote's appearance was extremely singular; "striking" is, I think, the most appropriate word for it. She was very tall, square-built, and high-shouldered, her hands and arms, feet and legs (the latter she was by no means averse to displaying), were uncommonly