distant consciousness that any advantage was to be gained by the good done, but the pleasure of doing it. The author ceased to exist when the pen was laid down. She reversed in her practice the quality attributed to Garrick—she never acted when off the stage; it was then that she became most herself, and most merited the praise of being "natural, simple, affecting." She was most beautiful when farthest removed from those artificial lights in which she was too fond of exhibiting herself. In her, the constant flush of the affections was, after all, lovelier than the sparkling fancy or the glowing intellect.

What her real feelings towards her friends were, may be partly seen by her letters to some of the dearest of them; this is to a certain extent true also of her opinions and tastes; but here she was not so serious, and the rule is the less unerring. We find an example in a fact to which Dr. Thomson has directed our attention, that notwithstanding her devoted affection for the metropolis, expressed in several of the letters now published, she had in reality a fine taste for the beauties of the country. "In a visit," says that constant friend of L. E. L., "with which she favoured us at Brokham, near Dorking, we were in the habit of walking out daily; and whilst Mrs. Thomson would sit down to sketch from nature,*<ref>* This incident is alluded to in one of the last letters L. E. L. ever wrote. How fondly were such scenes remembered in Africa.</poem> L. E. L. would take my arm and range over the fields for hours together, stopping every now and then to expatiate on the beauty of some new opening scene, or to listen while I explained the botanical character of a wild flower, or some fact in vegetable physiology.