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, THE REMBRANDT and good SIR WALTER — only these Could paint her all to you: experienced ease, And antique liveliness, and ponderous grace; The broad Scots tongue that flatters, scolds, defies; Much is she worth, and even more is made of her. The doctors love her, tease her, use her skill. Staff Nurse: New Style BLUE-E W. E. Henley LUE-EYED and bright of face, but waning fast I view her as she enters, day by day, As a sweet sunset almost overpast. Kindly and calm, patrician to the last, The plainest cap is somehow touched with caste. At BALZAC's name, sighs it at "poor GEORGE Sand's "; 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 handsome and well made. Her face was rather that of a clever man than a woman, and I used to think there was some resemblance between herself and our piratical friend, Trelawney. Her familiar style of language among her intimates was something that could only be believed by those who heard it; it was technical to a degree that was amazing. But little usual as her modes of expression were, she never seemed to be in the slightest degree aware of the startling effect they produced; she uttered them with the most straightforward unconsciousness and un concern. Her taste in dress was, as might have been expected, slightly eccentric, but, for a person with so discordant colours was singular. The first time I ever saw her she was dressed in a bright brimstone-coloured silk gown, made so short as to show her feet and ankles, having on her head a white satin hat, with a forest of white feathers; and I remember her standing, with her feet wide apart and her arms akimbo, in this costume before me, and challenging me upon some political question by which, and her appearance, I was much astonished and a little frightened. One evening she came to my sister's house dressed entirely in black, but with scarlet shoes on, with which I suppose she was particularly pleased, for she lay on a sofa with her feet higher than her head, American fashion, the better to display or contemplate them. I remember, at a party, being seated by Sydney Smith, when Mrs. Grote entered with a rose-coloured turban on her head, at which he suddenly exclaimed, "Now I know the meaning of the word grotesque!" The mischievous wit professed his cordial liking for both her and her husband, saying, "I like them, I like them; I like him, he is so ladylike; and I like her, she's such a perfect gentleman." Fanny Kemble Mrs. Procter TEP-DAUGHTER of Basil Montagu, the most ac STE complished editor of Bacon prior to Mr. Spedding; widow of Barry Cornwall the poet, the intimate friend and the biographer of Charles Lamb; mother of Adelaide Procter the poetess, the ornament of anthologies when anthologies are not, as we may say, pedantic; friend of a hundred eminent men and perpetuator, for our age, of the tone of an age not ours, she requires, no doubt, some introduction to a mistimed generation. Introductions of Mrs. Procter, however, are difficult; they were in her lifetime all but impossible; they assumed ignorances on the part of others, just as they assumed preoccupations on her own, that were, on the whole, less of a nature to clear the air than of a nature to cloud it. For the present perhaps too easily and too variously solicited chronicler she had at all events, as an admirable friend, during her latest years, a value that he always qualified, to himself, as historic; and not at all, moreover, in the comparatively superficial sense of her associations and accretions, her extraordinary names and dates, her long backward span and her persistent presence, but in the finer one of her being such a character, such a figure, as the generations appear pretty well to have ceased to produce, quite as if the technical secret of the "paste," like that of some old fabric or mixture, had been lost to them. "There are no more It made" that might well be the answer given across the social counter to an inquirer curious of reasons. was her tone that was her value and her identity, and that kept her from being feebly modern; her sharpness of outline was in that in the absence there of the little modern mercies, muddlements, confusions and compromises. English to the core and thoroughly of her class, of her social affiliation, infinitely humorous and human, with perfect distinctness of wit and dauntlessness of opinion, a partisan to her last breath (which meant, on her part, an admirable constancy of favour and of its opposite), she testified somehow to a stouter and harder world than ours, an order more decreed and accepted, one in which the temper had had more at once to give and more to take, more to reckon with, but also more, within its rights, to maintain. Mrs. Procter's rights were, to take her own view, of the sharpest, but they included, delightfully, the right to be, however inconsequently (if that was the only way), pleased; which she employed with the finest effect. I remember her once telling me, in answer to some question, after Dowden's Life of Shelley had come out, that she recalled, from her girlhood, an occasion on which Leigh Hunt had said, in her father's house, that he was going up to Hampstead to see what Shelley's "new wife was like"; and that she also recalled his saying, on her asking him, at the next opportunity, for news of his errand: "Oh, she's like a cross baby." This reminiscence, I further recollect, had been determined by my asking her if she had known Mrs. Shelley on the latter's return to England. "Oh dear, no - one didn't know her; she wasn't received": that was a picture, I recall, precious for the old tone. But it was on my marvelling, a little irreflectively, at the antiquity of her |