in the intimate friendship which grew closer as the time of parting drew nigh.  Lady Lovelace died in 1852; and for her few remaining years, Lady Byron was devoted to her grandchildren.  But nearer calls never lessened her interest in remoter objects.  Her mind was of the large and clear quality which could comprehend remote interests in their true proportions, and achieve each aim as perfectly as if it were the only one.  Her agents used to say that it was impossible to mistake her directions; and thus her business was usually well done.  There was no room, in her case, for the ordinary doubts, censures, and sneers about the misapplication of bounty.  Her taste did not lie in the “Charity Ball” direction; her funds were not lavished in encouraging hypocrisy and improvidence among the idle and worthless; and the quality of her charity was, in fact, as admirable as its quantity.  Her chief aim was the extension and improvement of popular education; but there was no kind of misery that she heard of that she did not palliate to the utmost, and no kind of solace that her quick imagination and sympathy could devise that she did not administer.  In her methods, she united consideration and frankness with singular success.  For one instance among a thousand:—­A lady with whom she had had friendly relations some time before, and who became impoverished in a quiet way by hopeless sickness, preferred poverty, with an easy conscience, to a competency attended by some uncertainty about the perfect rectitude of the resource.  Lady Byron wrote to an intermediate person exactly what she thought of the case.  Whether the judgment of the sufferer was right or mistaken was nobody’s business but her own:  this was the first point.  Next, a voluntary poverty could never be pitied by anybody:  that was the second.  But it was painful to others to think of the mortification to benevolent feelings which attends poverty; and there could be no objection to arresting that pain.  Therefore she, Lady Byron, had lodged in a neighboring bank the sum of one hundred pounds, to be used for benevolent purposes; and in order to preclude all outside speculation, she had made the money payable to the order of the intermediate person, so that the sufferer’s name need not appear at all.  Five-and-thirty years of unremitting secret bounty like this must make up a great amount of human happiness:  but this was only one of a wide variety of methods of doing good.  It was the unconcealable magnitude of her beneficence, and its wise quality, which made her a second time the theme of English conversation in all honest households within the four seas.  Years ago, it was said far and wide, that Lady Byron was doing more good than anybody else in England; and it was difficult to imagine how anybody could do more.  Lord Byron spent every shilling that the law allowed him out of her property, while he lived, and left away from her every shilling that he could deprive her of by his will; yet she had eventually a large