sermon from a divine who was thought to be one of the great lights of the Assembly at Westminster; with a little turn for coquetry, which was yet perfectly compatible with warm and disinterested attachment, and a little turn for satire, which yet seldom passed the bounds of good nature.  She loved reading; but her studies were not those of Queen Elizabeth and Lady Jane Grey.  She read the verses of Cowley and Lord Broghill, French Memoirs recommended by her lover, and the Travels of Fernando Mendez Pinto.  But her favourite books were those ponderous French romances which modern readers know chiefly from the pleasant satire of Charlotte Lennox.  She could not, however, help laughing at the vile English into which they were translated.  Her own style is very agreeable; nor are her letters at all the worse for some passages in which raillery and tenderness are mixed in a very engaging namby-pamby.

“When at last the constancy of the lovers had triumphed over all the obstacles which kinsmen and rivals could oppose to their union, a yet more serious calamity befell them.  Poor Mistress Osborne fell ill of the small-pox, and, though she escaped with life, lost all her beauty.  To this most severe trial the affection and honour of the lovers of that age was not unfrequently subjected.  Our readers probably remember what Mrs. Hutchinson tells us of herself.  The lofty Cornelia-like spirit of the aged matron seems to melt into a long forgotten softness when she relates how her beloved Colonel ’married her as soon as she was able to quit the chamber, when the priest and all that saw her were affrighted to look on her.  But God,’ she adds, with a not ungraceful vanity, ’recompensed his justice and constancy by restoring her as well as before.’  Temple showed on this occasion the same justice and constancy which did so much honour to Colonel Hutchinson.  The date of the marriage is not exactly known, but Mr. Courtenay supposes it to have taken place about the end of the year 1654.  From this time we lose sight of Dorothy, and are reduced to form our opinion of the terms on which she and her husband were from very slight indications which may easily mislead us.”

When an editor is in the pleasant position of being able to retain an historian of the eminence of Macaulay to write a large portion of his introduction, it would ill become him to alter and correct his statements wherever there was a petty inaccuracy; still it is necessary to say, once for all, that there are occasional errors in the passage,—­as where Macaulay mentions that Chicksands is no longer the property of the Osbornes,—­though happily not one of these errors is in itself important.  To our thinking, too, in the character that he draws of our heroine, Macaulay hardly appears to be sufficiently aware of the sympathetic womanly nature of Dorothy, and the dignity of her disposition; so that he is persuaded to speak of her too constantly from the position of a man of the world praising with patronizing emphasis the pretty qualities of a school-girl.  But we must remember, that in forming our estimate of her character, we have an extended series of letters before us; and from these the reader can draw his own conclusions as to the accuracy of Macaulay’s description, and the importance of Dorothy’s character.