In religion she is at least a latitudinarian, neither an enemy nor a stranger to books which maintain the opinions of freethinkers 5; wherein she is the more to be blamed, as having too much morality to need their assistance, and requiring only a due degree of faith for putting her in the road to salvation. I speak this of her as a private lady, not as a court favourite, for in this latter capacity she can show neither faith nor works.

If she had never seen a court, it is possible she might have been a friend.

She abounds in good words and good wishes, and will concert a hundred schemes with those whom she favours, in order to their advancement; schemes that sometimes arise from them, and sometimes from herself, although at the same time she very well knows that both are without the least probability to succeed. But to do her justice, she never feeds or deceives any person with promises where she doth not

5 This was perhaps true of her mistress Caroline, and of Mrs. Clayton, who had also a great influence with the queen: but we find from the correspondence, that Mrs. Howard herself was not a freethinker, and that she reproved those of her friends who were.

then think that she intendeth some degree of sincerity.

She is upon the whole an excellent companion for men of the best accomplishments who have nothing to ask.

What part she may act hereafter in a larger sphere, as lady of the bedchamber to a great queen, and in high esteem with a king, neither she nor I can foretell. My own opinion is natural and obvious, that her talents as a courtier

6 In Coxe's Life of Sir Robert Walpole, vol. ii. p. 281, we find the following passage-" Swift says, in a letter to Lady "Betty Germaine- For these reasons I did always, and do "still think, Mrs. Howard (now Lady Suffolk) an absolute "courtier.' When this character was shown to Lady Suffolk, "she mildly observed, It is very different from that which "he sent me himself, and which I have in his own hand" writing.'"

Horace Walpole, as we have seen, talks in his Reminiscences, of Two characters. The archdeacon supposes one of the characters to have been given in Swift's letter to Lady Betty Germaine; this version, the archdeacon has been so kind as to inform me, he received orally from Walpole before the Reminiscences were printed; but it is quite as incorrect as the former statement; for Lady Suffolk never could have made any such observation; and so far was it from being very different, that it is identically the same opinion of her "being a courtier," which is here expressed in the Character in her own possession. Walpole hated Swift, and when he hated, no regard for truth was permitted to blunt the edge of his anec dotical satire.

will spread, enlarge, and multiply to such a degree, that her private virtues, for want of room and time to operate, must be folded and laid up clean like clothes in a chest, never to be put on till satiety, or some reverse of fortune, shall dispose her to retirement. In the mean time it will be her prudence to take care that they may not be tarnished or moth-eaten, for want of opening and airing, and turning at least once a year.

TO A CERTAIN LADY AT COURT.

BY MR. POPE.

[This little compliment of Pope to Mrs. Howard is, says Dr. Wharton, " equal in elegance to any compliment that Waller has paid to Sacharissa; especially the last stanza, and the answer to Envy."

This praise seems rather excessive-the last stanza particularly, in which a personal defect is confounded with a moral fault, and in which the personal defect is made so very prominent, seems hardly to merit the extravagant praise of elegance which Wharton bestows upon it.]

I KNOW, a thing that's most uncommon,
(Envy be silent, and attend!)

I know a reasonable woman,
Handsome and witty, yet a friend.

Not warp'd by passion, awed by rumour,

Not grave through pride, or gay through folly— An equal mixture of good humour,

And sensible soft melancholy.

"Has she no faults then (Envy says) sir?"Yes, she has one, I must aver;

When all the world conspires to praise her,

The woman's deaf, and does not hear!

SONG,

BY THE EARL OF PETERBOROUGH.

[The following verses are, perhaps, the same to which Lord Peterborough refers in his subsequent correspondence with Mrs. Howard. Walpole, in his account of Lord Peterborough's writings, makes a strange blunder on the subject of these verses.

"This lord wrote," says Walpole, "a ballad beginning, "I said to my heart between sleeping and waking.' He 66 was also the author of those well-known lines which con"clude 'Who'd have thought Mrs. Howard ne'er dreamt "it was she.'

Of these well-known lines on his dear friend, Walpole knew so little, that he has quoted the first and the last lines of the same poem as belonging to two different pieces. The verses themselves seem very much superior to Pope's compliment, though the last line is awkward, and hardly grammatical.]

I SAID to my heart, between sleeping and waking, "Thou wild thing, that always art leaping or aching, What black, brown, or fair, in what clime, in what nation,

By turns has not taught thee a pit-a-patation?"

Thus accused, the wild thing gave this sober reply:"See, the heart without motion, though Celia pass by! Not the beauty she has, not the wit that she borrows, Give the eye any joys, or the heart any sorrows.