to Pym of the King’s coming to the House to seize the five members.  In 1648 she appears, however, to have assisted the Royalists with money for the purpose of raising a fleet to attack England, and at the Restoration she was received at Court, and employed herself in intriguing for the return of Queen Henrietta to England, which was opposed at the time by Clarendon and others.  Soon after this, and in the year of the Restoration, she died suddenly.  Poets of all grades, from Waller downwards, have sung of her beauty, vivacity, and wit; and Sir Toby Matthew speaks of her as “too lofty and dignified to be capable of friendship, and having too great a heart to be susceptible of love,”—­an extravagance of compliment hardly satisfactory in this plain age.

My Lord Paget, at whose house at Marlow Mr. Lely was staying, was a prominent loyalist both in camp and council chamber.  He married Frances, the eldest daughter of the Earl of Holland, my Lady Diana’s sister.

Whether or not Dorothy really assisted young Sir Harry Yelverton in his suit for the hand of fair Lady Ruthin we cannot say, but they were undoubtedly married.  Sir Harry Yelverton seems to have been a man of superior accomplishments and serious learning.  He was at this time twenty years of age, and had been educated at St. Paul’s School, London, and afterwards at Wadham College, Oxford, under the tutorship of Dr. Wilkins, Cromwell’s brother-in-law, a learned and philosophical mathematician.  He was admitted gentleman commoner in 1650, and it is said “made great proficiency in several branches of learning, being as exact a Latin and Grecian as any in the university of his age or time.”  He succeeded to his father’s title soon after coming of age, and took a leading part in the politics of the day, becoming Knight of the Shire of Northampton in the Restoration Parliament.  He was a high Tory, and a great defender of the Church and its ejected ministers, one of whom, Dr. Thomas Morton, the learned theologian, Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, died in his house in 1659.  He wrote a discourse on the “Truth and Reasonableness of the Religion delivered by Jesus Christ,” a Preface to Dr. Morton’s work on Episcopacy, and a vindication of the Church of England against the attacks of the famous Edward Bagshawe.

In this letter Dorothy describes some husbands whom she could not marry.  See what she expects in a lover!  Have we not here some local squires hit off to the life?  Could George Eliot herself have done more for us in like space?

SIR,—­Why are you so sullen, and why am I the cause?  Can you believe that I do willingly defer my journey?  I know you do not.  Why, then, should my absence now be less supportable to you than heretofore?  Nay, it shall not be long (if I can help it), and I shall break through all inconveniences rather than deny you anything that lies in my power to grant.  But by your own rules, then, may I not expect the same from you?  Is