quenching her vivacity, or in influencing her religious opinions. Indeed, the atmosphere of her home was not favourable to their growth. Mrs. Hay had been intimate with Hume, and all the distinguished men in Edinburgh, she was deeply imbued with the philosophy of the eighteenth century, and it was to the introductions furnished by Hume that she and her daughter owed their first acquaintance with the rising men in France. But Mary was never an unbeliever or a republican, although she used to say, "Je me suis faite Luthérienne pour plaire à M. Mohl; " she was faithful to the Church of her birth; her little red-and-gold morocco-covered Prayer-book always, to the end of her life, lay on her dressingtable; she went regularly to church when in England, and abhorred anything like profane conversation as much as she did coarseness of every kind. She was a staunch Royalist, loved our queen, revered the Orleans family, longed to see the Comte de Paris on the throne, and always said that Louis Philippe's fall was occasioned by his humanity in not choosing to fire on the people. She hated tyranny in every shape, in that of a mob as well as in the form of a despot or of a sect.

After Mr. Clarke's death, his widow and her mother left the south of France, and came with little Mary to live in Paris. One of her most lively recollections was seeing, from the back of a trooper's horse, the allies enter Paris, in 1813. The late Lord Houghton told me in June, 1885, that he had seen a sketch of the scene in some exhibition in Paris, with Madame Mohl perched on the horse behind a bold dragoon. When she was about fifteen, her mother, considering her to be wanting in conventional manners, sent her to spend a year with her sister at Cold Overton: she amused herself there considerably, riding all over the country with her brotherin-law, whose pet she became; but although she loved her sister dearly, she said that she rejoiced when she returned to her mother and liberty. She idolized her mother, and she

often told me that her mother had the sweetest temper of any one she ever had known, and that she owed her unfailing spirits to never having been snubbed by her.

She continued, however, to pay yearly visits to England. She had always longed to see Madame de Staël, and on one of these visits she heard that the great authoress was staying at a hotel in London; so she resolved to see her, but she had no introduction, and Madame de Staël was not easily approached. It was thus that she told us how she accomplished her object :

My dear, I happened to have a little money in my pocket, so slipped out of the house, called a coach, and ordered the man to drive me to the hotel (she was not clear as to where it was). I had heard that Madame de Staël was looking out for a governess, and I resolved to offer myself. I was shown in; Madame de Staël was there, and the brattikin (a little boy). She was très grande dame, very courteous, asked me to sit down, said I looked very young, and proceeded to ask me my capabilities. I agreed to everything, for I wanted to have a little talk with her. Of course I couldn't have taught him at all, I could never have been bothered with him. So at last she repeated that I was too young, and bowed me out. This was the only time I saw Madame de Staël, and I never told anybody when I got home.

In a letter to Miss Wyse, she thus describes her glimpse of London society while on a visit to Mrs. and Miss Benger:

I think your making Paris your home a wise thing. I may be mistaken, but the habits of London appear to me dreadful compared to those here. Who can pop in in London to dinner or evening tea? The only pop tea you can have is at five; now, that is an hour to be made useful, not for play: I often catch myself, at eight or nine, wishing you would come in to the social cup. What I complain of in London is that their habits were like those in other countries when I was young. I lived some weeks with two ladies, mother and daughter, the latter was wondrous clever. They dined at five, Miss Benger's portrait hung in the salon of the Rue du Bac.

drank tea at eight, and they were not out of the pale of humanity, though not fashionable. Many and many a time a young lawyer or otherwise clever man would pop in and stay an hour perhaps, to talk. This clever daughter might be about thirty, which I, being about fourteen, thought very old, yet I was a grown person— chattered like a magpie, interlarded with French. I was taken about as a curiosity to many other teas at the same hour. No doubt these were not fashionable people, but they were very cultivated and literary. Now, since that time, literary people have dwindled into the fancy of being fashionable, and it has ruined their society. No doubt these were the remains-I may say the tail-of the days when Dr. Johnson was the delight of all London at Mrs. Thrale's, the brewer's wife. It was after dinner, and not at all late—eight, nine, or ten, I suppose. Those evenings in the last century left a good long tail among people of moderate means and sociable lively brains. But being invited to a tea-party at nine was still feasible and common in 1820 to 1830; not among fashionable, but among cultivated people-lawyers, doctors, and literary folk. The ruin of this large cultivated middle-class has been the vulgar hankering for fashionable, fine, and frivolous people. What a pity they could not see that they lost all the real pleasures of society by this absurd weakness. Miss Edgeworth saw it coming on, and often attacks it with her steady good sense, but she lived long enough to see the old habits crushed and killed for ever. There's no society in

London now-none, none !

Notwithstanding this sweeping denunciation, written when mind and strength were failing, she enjoyed herself immensely in London-indeed, she would not otherwise have been the very grateful person she always with truth described herself as being, for she was as much loved and appreciated here as in France.

To return, however, to her early life. When first in Paris, her life was very migratory. The three ladies took an apartment in the Rue Mélée, an old street in old Paris, which Madame Mohl loved dearly to visit and look up at the windows in later days; then in the Rue Tournon, and the Rue

du Vieux Colombier. It was not till 1820, after Mrs. Hay's death, that they went to live in the Rue Bonaparte, called at that time the Rue des Petits Augustins. Strict economy was then necessary, for Mrs. Clarke had lost a great part of her income on account of a lawsuit. She never, either here or elsewhere, attempted to form a salon until after 1838; and it was only after 1847 that Mary, as Madame Mohl, began the celebrated Friday evenings in the Rue du Bac.

Mary had many devoted admirers among the young men who visited in the Rue des Petits Augustins. One of them was Quinet, the well-known historian, from whom she preserved a whole heap of letters. Another was Thiers. When he first arrived in Paris from Marseilles to push his fortunes, he was introduced to Mrs. and Miss Clarke as to people who might help him on. "What can you do?" asked Mrs. Clarke. "Je sais manier la plume," was the reply. She introduced him to the editor of the Constitutionnel, and the first article he wrote was in praise of a piece of sculpture executed by a friend of Mrs. Clarke's. He was greatly attracted by Mary, and at one time took to coming every evening and staying till long past midnight. One day the porter, who had become exasperated, called out to Miss Clarke, "Mademoiselle, j'ai quelque chose à vous dire. Si ce petit étudiant qui vient ici tous les soirs ne s'en va pas avant minuit je fermerai la porte et j'irai me coucher. Il pourra dormir sous la porte cochère, ça le guérira." She never knew how deep was the impression she produced until some weeks before his death, when she met him at the Isle Adam, in the house of her friend, Madame Chevreux. She thus describes the interview in a letter written to Lady Derby in 1877

My friends at Stors were very busy and ardent about the elections for their department, and invited Thiers, whom they had known for eight or nine years, to come and grace the assembly of voters by his

presence on the election day-Sunday, August 5. I had not seen him since the great change in '70, or probably two or three years before. He was a different man-had lost all the vivacity that especially distinguished him. He shook hands and was civil to the electors, friendly with the candidates, but the ancient spirit I missed. As he saw me unexpectedly, he came up with something of his former warmth, and stood and sat with me most of the time while the crowd was pushing about the house and grounds. Whether our early days came back more vividly than they had ever done, when I had seen him at my house or long after had met him elsewhere, I know not, but it seemed a foreboding that it would be the last, for he was quite profuse in his remembrances of the days when he used to come every night, when I was about seventeen, and when he met the friends who used to come also every night. My dear mother spoilt me, and was hospitable to these habitués who made our room most nights their resting-place, to whom Thiers at that time was inferior and subordinate. He used to outstay them all, and never seemed to have enough of talk in those days. All that, indeed, was before he became a public man. I had seen him long since from time to time, and he dined with us now and then within the last twenty years, and never seemed to think of our former intimacy; but on this day all the interval was forgotten, all seemed to return, and he talked of nothing but those early days, and when he bade good-bye to M. Chevreux he said how pleased he had been to have met me once more-that it had recalled all the pleasantest days of his life. Of course his death, just a month after, now gives to this last interview a solemnity I did not think of at the time, for I was more struck with the loss of his wonderful vivacity than with the sort of serious turn that he seemed to give to our meeting.

In the following year, in spite of her friends' remonstrances, Madame Mohl insisted on going to the anniversary ceremony of his death, bearing the fatigue of standing for hours in the broiling sun.

A more serious lover in her young days was M. Auguste Sirey. To him Mary was sincerely attached, and would have married him had it not been for his early death. In old age she would tell the story with much pathos, and end by