is Catholic, unpuritanical; no methodism about the square windows, set here and there at undecided intervals wheresoever they may be wanted.  Six attic windows jut out from the low-tiled roof.  At the corner of the house is a high pinnacled buttress rising the full height of the wall; five buttresses flank the side wall, built so that they shade the lower windows from the morning sun,—­in one place reaching to the sill of an upper window.  At the further end of the wall are two Gothic windows, claustral remnants, lighting now perhaps the dining-hall where cousin Molle and Dorothy sat in state, or the saloon where the latter received her servants.  There are still cloisters attached to the house, at the other side of it maybe.  Yes, a sleepy country house, the warm earth and her shrubs creeping close up to the very sills of the lower windows, sending in morning fragrance, I doubt not, when Dorothy thrust back the lattice after breakfast.  A quiet place,—­“slow” is the accurate modern epithet for it—­“awfully slow;” but to Dorothy a quite suitable home, at which she never repines.

This etching by Thomas Fisher, of December 26, 1816, is the more valuable to us since the old Chicksands Priory no longer remains, having suffered martyrdom at the bloody hands of the restorer.  For through this partly we have attained to a knowledge of Dorothy’s surroundings; and through the baronetages, peerages, and the invincible heaps of genealogical records, we have gathered some few actual facts necessary to be known of Dorothy’s relations, her human surroundings, their lives and actions.  And we shall not find ourselves following Dorothy’s story with the less interest that we have mastered these details about the Osbornes of Chicksands.

Temple, too, claims the consideration at our hands of a few words concerning his near relatives and their position in the country.  As Macaulay tells us, he was born in 1628, the place of his birth being Blackfriars in London.

Sir John Temple, his father, was Master of the Rolls and a Privy Councillor in Ireland; he was in the confidence of Robert Sidney, Earl of Leicester, the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland.  Algernon Sydney, the Earl’s son, was well known to Temple, and perhaps to Dorothy.  Sir John Temple, like his son in after life, refused to look on politics as a game in which it was always advisable to play on the winning side, and thus we find him opposing the Duke of Ormond in Ireland in 1643, and suffering imprisonment as a partisan of the Parliament.  In England, in 1648, when he was member for Chichester, he concurred with the Presbyterian vote, thereby causing the more advanced section to look askance at him, and he was turned out of the House, or secluded, to use the elegant parliamentary language of the day.  From that time he lived in retirement in London until 1654, when, as we read in Dorothy’s letters, he and his son go over to Ireland.  He resumed his office of Master of the Rolls, and in August of that year was elected to the Irish Parliament as one of the members for Leitrim, Sligo, and Roscommon.