to Lord George Poynings, her old flame, in which she addressed him by the most affectionate names, and implored him to find a refuge for her against her oppressors; but they would fatigue the reader to peruse, as they would me to copy.  The fact is, that this unlucky lady had the knack of writing a great deal more than she meant.  She was always reading novels and trash; putting herself into imaginary characters and flying off into heroics and sentimentalities with as little heart as any woman I ever knew; yet showing the most violent disposition to be in love.  She wrote always as if she was in a flame of passion.  I have an elegy on her lap-dog, the most tender and pathetic piece she ever wrote; and most tender notes of remonstrance to Betty, her favourite maid; to her housekeeper, on quarrelling with her; to half-a-dozen acquaintances, each of whom she addressed as the dearest friend in the world, and forgot the very moment she took up another fancy.  As for her love for her children, the above passage will show how much she was capable of true maternal feeling:  the very sentence in which she records the death of one child serves to betray her egotisms, and to wreak her spleen against myself; and she only wishes to recall another from the grave, in order that he may be of some personal advantage to her.  If I did deal severely with this woman, keeping her from her flatterers who would have bred discord between us, and locking her up out of mischief, who shall say that I was wrong?  If any woman deserved a strait-waistcoat,—­it was my Lady Lyndon; and I have known people in my time manacled, and with their heads shaved, in the straw, who had not committed half the follies of that foolish, vain, infatuated creature.

My mother was so enraged by the charges against me and herself which these letters contained, that it was with the utmost difficulty I could keep her from discovering our knowledge of them to Lady Lyndon; whom it was, of course, my object to keep in ignorance of our knowledge of her designs:  for I was anxious to know how far they went, and to what pitch of artifice she would go.  The letters increased in interest (as they say of the novels) as they proceeded.  Pictures were drawn of my treatment of her which would make your heart throb.  I don’t know of what monstrosities she did not accuse me, and what miseries and starvation she did not profess herself to undergo; all the while she was living exceedingly fat and contented, to outward appearances, at our house at Castle Lyndon.  Novel-reading and vanity had turned her brain.  I could not say a rough word to her (and she merited many thousands a day, I can tell you), but she declared I was putting her to the torture; and my mother could not remonstrate with her but she went off into a fit of hysterics, of which she would declare the worthy old lady was the cause.