of a cause.  Principle, however, counted for much more with her than with the sex generally, and one can easily believe that her tenacity in adhering to it would have been proof against any ordeal whether of persecution or persuasion.  This trait was not more strikingly illustrated by the strength and fervency of her Whiggism amid the reactionary tide produced by the excesses of the French Revolution than by the circumstances of her marriage.  The only child of a small landed proprietor in Yorkshire, she had no lack of opportunities for gratifying her father’s ambition by marrying in a rank far above her own.  Nor was it her ardent affection for the man of her choice that made her strong against entreaties and reproaches.  She would probably have been capable of any sacrifice of feeling imposed by her sense of duty, but it was this latter sentiment that forbade the sacrifice.  “I was not, perhaps,” she writes, “what in the language of romance is called in love with Mr. Fletcher, but I was deeply and tenderly attached to him.  He had inspired a confidence and regard I had never felt for any other man.  I could not bear the thought of marrying in opposition to my father’s will, but I was resolved on principle never to marry so long as Mr. Fletcher remained single.”  He was twenty years her senior, without fortune, and hindered, instead of aided, in his struggle at the Scottish bar by his prominence as an advocate of reform.  These, she admits, were “sound and rational objections,” and could she have prevailed on Mr. Fletcher to release her from the engagement, this solution, she confesses, would have been less painful to her than offending her father.  But her lover remaining firm, she decided after two years, having come of age in the interval, to take the step dictated by honor as well as inclination, and which the event proved to have been, as she anticipated, “best for the interest and happiness of all parties.”

Her married life lasted thirty-seven years, and she survived her husband nearly thirty more, dying in 1858 at the age of eighty-seven.  Her career was, on the whole, one of singular happiness and prosperity, made so in part by fortunate circumstances, but in a still greater degree by her sunny temperament, her power of attracting and retaining friends, her unflagging interest in public affairs and her unshaken belief in human progress.  Jeffrey and Brougham were among her earliest friends, Carlyle and Mazzini among her latest, and there have been few Englishmen of note in the present century whose names do not appear in the list.  Unfortunately, they appear for the most part as names only.  They occur incidentally in a record intended not for the public, but for the writer’s own family, whose interest in her personal history needed no stimulant and called for no extraneous details.  Here and there we find a passage calculated to whet if not to satisfy a more general curiosity, such as the account of a conversation with Wordsworth