terest enough to accredit Walpole's imputation of her having sometimes made a pecuniary traffic of it. The correspondence reveals some instances of offers; it appears that she rejected the bribe and refused the favour: the very offer, however, in such a case goes further in establishing a character of venality than an individual rejection can reach in refutation. The spirit of the age was very corrupt the Ministry and the Houses of Parliament set an example which the Court and the public-hoc fonte derivata-were not averse to imitate; but as Sir Robert himself admitted that she never took money, we are willing to hope, and indeed we believe, that the favourite of Queen Caroline may have received a present of a marble table from Lord Pembroke, or even of a pair of diamond ear-rings from Lord Pomfret-the ladies of both those peers being her court colleagues and personal friends— without having been guilty of systematic corruption. Indeed there are some reasons which induce us to receive the famous story of the Ear-rings cum grano salis. Sir Robert hated Mrs. Clayton, and probably vexed at being thwarted in his own disposal of the place, would naturally give the worst colour to her interference; and the sarcasms of the Duchess of Marlborough and Lady Mary prove only that there was such a rumour.

Our readers would not thank us for encumbering our pages with any specimens of the stupid flattery and greedy solicitation of the majority of Lady Sundon's correspondents: of the few that are of a different character, the best (though of no remarkable merit) are three or four of the celebrated Lord Hervey, of which we shall extract the liveliest, though we fear that some of the points may not be very intelligible, for want of those notes for which the editor has so much contempt, and which we have not room to supply:

'MADAM,

Hampton Court, July 31, 1733. 'I am going this afternoon with the Duke of Richmond to Goodwood, for three or four days, but cannot leave this place without returning you my thanks for the favour of your letter; a debt, perhaps, you would be more ready to forgive than receive, but as it is of that sort, that one pays more for one's own sake than one's creditors', I plead no merit from the discharge of it, but the pleasure of taking any occasion to assure you how much I am your humble servant.

'I will not trouble you with any account of our occupations at Hampton Court. No mill-horse ever went in a more constant track or a more unchanging circle; so that, by the assistance of an almanack for the day of the week, and a watch for the hour of the day, you may inform yourself fully, without any other intelligence but your memory, of every transaction within the verge of the Court. Walking, chaises, levees, and audiences fill the morning; at night the King plays at commerce

and

and backgammon, and the Queen at quadrille, where poor Lady Charlotte runs her usual nightly gauntlet-the Queen pulling her hood, Mr. Schutz sputtering in her face, and the Princess Royal rapping her knuckles, all at a time. It was in vain she fled from persecution for her religion she suffers for her pride what she escaped for her faith; undergoes in a drawing-room what she dreaded from the inquisition, and will die a martyr to a Court, though not to a church.

The Duke of Grafton takes his nightly opiate of lottery, and sleeps as usual between the Princesses Amelia and Carolina; Lord Grantham strolls from one room to another (as Dryden says) like some discontented ghost that oft appears, and is forbid to speak, and stirs himself about, as people stir a fire, not with any design, but in hopes to make it burn brisker, which his lordship constantly does, to no purpose, and yet tries as constantly as if it had ever once succeeded. At last the King comes up, the pool finishes, and everybody has their dismission: their Majesties retire to Lady Charlotte and my Lord Lifford; the Princesses, to Bilderbec and Lony; my Lord Grantham, to Lady Frances and Mr. Clark ; some to supper and some to bed; and thus (to speak in the Scripture phrase) the evening and the morning make the day.

'Adieu, dear Madam, and believe me, without the formality of a conclusion, 'Most sincerely yours, HERVEY.'

-vol. ii. pp. 230-232.

There are also half a dozen gossiping letters from Mrs. Clayton's niece, Miss Dyves (afterwards the wife of Lord Chesterfield's friend. Chenevix, bishop of Waterford), who was about the Princess Royal, which have a little court tittle-tattle and se laissent lire; and there are a few letters from a Mrs. Strangways Horner, who was embarrassed with a crazy husband and an heiress daughter, and confided her conjugal and maternal anxieties to Mrs. Clayton, who had been employed to recommend one of the suitors. The young lady eventually married Stephen Fox, afterwards created Lord Ilchester. The publication of these letters might have vexed Lord Ilchester's family a century ago, but now can have little interest for them, and none at all for the public. The most considerable class in the collection are the letters of Lady Pomfret, already known to the literary world by her not very amusing correspondence with Lady Hertford. Those now produced are not worth the paper on which they are printed; and the only amusement that they can afford is that the editor makes them the occasion of exhibiting even more than her ordinary absurdity. For instance, she thus introduces them :

In the second of these letters the Countess shows how much she valued the guidance of Mrs. Clayton, in steering her difficult track between contending interests in the Court-that of the Queen and of the Princess of Wales-whose rival Courts divided the homage of the

great

great world. The humility of that epistle, from the lofty Lady Pomfret, is surprising; but some allowance must be made for the reverential style of the day.'-vol. i. pp. 116, 117.

The letter is dated 14th of October, 1725. The editor, in her usual anxiety to introduce even the most worthless letters with a flourish of trumpets, forgot that there was no Queen at that time, nor until the Princess herself became Queen in June, 1727; and any one who wades through the very dull letter itself (which the editor deems characteristic of ease and enjoyment') will see that there is no question of Lady Pomfret's steering her difficult track between the contending interests of rival courts,' but simply that having been recently appointed lady of the bed-chamber to the Princess, she consulted the older experience of Mrs. Clayton as to some of the ceremonial details of her new office.

There is a considerable number of letters from Robert Clayton, successively Bishop of Killala, Cork, and Cloghera relative of Mr. Clayton, and no doubt placed on the bench in the first instance through the interest of, as the editor says, his powerful relation.' Bishop Clayton was a friend of Clarke and Hoadly, and the author of many works of an Arian tendency. He concluded his public career by a motion, in 1744, in the Irish House of Lords, for the abrogation of the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds; and it is said that his death was accelerated by the displeasure and threats of censure, and even deprivation, which followed this proposition. The editor tells us that he was a man of remarkable liberality and generosity,' and that his letters afford a valuable insight into the social and political condition of Ireland at that time,' and the Biographies assure us that he was 'a prelate of distinguished worth and probity.' For our part, we find little in his letters but a low spirit of jobbing and adulation, and-for once we agree with the consistent editor

it is with a feeling of something like disgust that we view his endeavours to obtain preferment by the crooked arts of political subserviency, and read his fulsome compliments to his patroness, Mrs. Clayton.'vol. ii. p. 4.

The correspondence is discreditable to the liberal and generous' Bishop, both as to ability and integrity-does no honour to his patrons-and will equally disgust and weary any reader who shall persist in plodding through it.

Dr. Samuel Clarke was of course a favourite with the 'patroness of the heterodox clergy,' but we do not find any correspondence with him; but there is an extensive one with Dr. Alured Clarke, chaplain to the King, prebendary of Westminster in 1731, clerk of the closet in 1734, and in 1740 dean

of

of Exeter, where he soon after died. His first preferments he no doubt owed to the Queen, of whom he published a character, which has been attributed to Lord Hervey. His letters, though they address Mrs. Clayton as Honoured' and sometimes Most Honoured Madam,' and are not free from the odour of adulation which infects the general mass, are upon the whole the most respectable in the book. He sometimes tells Mrs. Clayton, when she happened to be out of town, the news of the day, and occasionally takes some critical notice of new publications,all in a tone of moderation and good sense. He had a parish in Hampshire, and had a share in bringing Stephen Duck the thresher-poet to the notice of Mrs. Clayton and the Queen; and he was the person chiefly employed in forwarding the Queen's charitable intentions towards this poor man. Duck's story is to be found in all the Biographies-and it is told, as it never will be told again, in Southey's charming Essay on the Uneducated Poets;'-and Dr. Clarke's letters, though judicious in themselves, and in some passages not uninteresting, are too long to admit of their being transferred to our pages. We may, however, say— though it is no great praise-that these letters about poor Duck are the only dozen pages in the volumes which we should think worth preserving; they would find an appropriate place in the Gentleman's Magazine, when the rest of this farrago is consigned to thus et odores.

Such-at once so trivial and so dull-so swollen and so empty -are the Memoirs of Viscountess Sundon.' We assure our readers that we opened the book with no prepossession against it. Quite the contrary. We were inclined to receive with thanks any additional illustration, however slight, of a period in which it happens that the details of our domestic history are singularly scanty-the interval, we may say, between Swift and Horace Walpole. Our readers will perhaps wonder that we should have taken any trouble at all about such a performance as this but such publications tend, if unexposed, to propagate historical error, and we consider it as a part of our duty to discourage, as far as our influence may extend, a not creditable species of manufacture, now much in vogue, of which these volumes present a glaring specimen.

ART.

ART. IV.—Memoir of the Life of Elizabeth Fry. Edited by two of her Daughters. Vol. I. Svo. London, 1847.

WE E do not disguise the increasing hesitation with which we receive biographies founded on private notes and diaries that record, or seem to do so, the thoughts and struggles of the inmost heart. Any one of eminence, in the present day, who commits these things to paper, must do so under the full conviction that, like Castor and Pollux, as he himself sets, his journals will rise; and that whatever he has written in his closet will be proclaimed on the house-tops. Such a prospect of envied or unenvied fame cannot but give a tinge to the sentiments and language; cause the insertion of some incidents and reflections, and the suppression of others; bring forward art at the expense of nature; and, in short, prompt every one to wear his best for the eyes of posterity. The autobiography included in the present work must, however, be considered as in great measure exempt from this criticism. The larger proportion of it was written in early days, before journalizing had been reduced to a system, and secret cogitations forced into notoriety, like reluctant Speakers of old into the chair of the Commons. Yet, while the stamp of originality remains, we discern the traces of a revising hand—a hand guided by the experience and feelings of maturer years, which apparently has spared in candour much that it might otherwise have been wished to erase, and retouched the remainder, far less in vanity than in graceful timidity, so soon as Mrs. Fry had perceived beyond a doubt that, alive or dead, in true or false colours, she was destined to afford a repast to the public appetite. In truth, however, we should be loath to subject this publication to any ordinary criticism; it deals with common life, and yet soars above it; associates with man, and yet walks with God; never so elevated as when grovelling in the mire, it exhibits a career that cannot be surpassed—but which, we venture to add, ought not in all its parts to be generally followed.

That this admirable woman had a special vocation for the office she undertook is manifest in every step of her progress; her intellectual constitution was singularly adapted to the peculiar task; add to this the zeal which governed the whole, an enthusiasm regulated but never chilled by judgment;-and we have a character armed at all points, ready to take up the gauntlet of every conceivable obstacle that could impede her in the accomplishment of her great design. Among subordinate, yet very real advantages, we cannot fail to count the succour she derived from her connexion with the Society of Friends. A little eccentricity of action was considered permissible, and even

natural,