AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND CORRESPONDENCE OF SIRS. DELANY. * Mils. DELANY, née Mary

Granville, was the eldest daughter of Bernard Granville, son of Bernard, the second surviving son of the celebrated Sir Bevil Granville, "who was killed on Lansdown in the year 1643, fighting for his king and country." Bernard, his grandfather, the youngest son of Sir Bevil, was the welcome bearer of the message which invited Charles II. to return to his kingdom. Mary Granville was born May 14th, 1700. At six years old, she was placed under the care of a Madame Puelle, a refugee. Two years after, she went to live with Sir John and Lady Stanley at Whitehall. At fifteen years of age, we find her under the care of her aunt, Ann Granville, a "well-bred and agreeable woman," who had been maid of honour to Queen Mary. Later, she resided with her father and mother at Buckland, near Campden, Gloucester. At Buckland, she received and accepted an invitation from her uncle and aunt, Lord and Lady Lans- downe, to go with them to Bath, and afterwards to their country- seat, Longleat. When she was about seventeen, she consented, coerced by the menacing importunity of Lord Lansdowne, to marry Mr. Pendarves, of Roscrow, Cornwall, a man of sixty, whom she at first regarded with great abhorrence : an act, perhaps, for which we ought not too severely to condemn so young a girl, but which is as surely an immorality as if she had become a mother previously to her marriage. "I was married, she says, with great pomp. Never was woe cheesed out in gayer colours; and when I was led to the altar, I wished from my soul I had been led, as Iphigenia was, to be sacrificed. I was sacrificed. I lost, not life, indeed, but I lost all that makes life desirable—joy and peace of mind."

Though the young wife found it impossible to love, she deter-

• The Autobiography and Correspondence of Mary Granville, Mrs. Delany.

• With Interesting Reminiscences of King George the Third and Queen Charlotte. Edited by the Bight Honourable Lady Ilanover. Three volumes. Published by Bentley.

mined to obey and oblige "her tyrant, her jailor." Fortunately for her, in 1724-5, she was released, by the death of her husband, from her intolerable slavery. On the 31st of May, 1743, Mrs. Pendarves entered a second time into married life. Dr. Delany, a clergyman of learning and character, succeeded in winning the esteem, and, we believe, the affection of this accomplished woman. Her life now seems to have been a happy and blameless one. She read, she played, she painted; she was kind and good; she was genial and pious. Her husband loved, almost worshipped her ; avoiding publicity, she acquired a name that has "been hallowed and remembered for more than a hundred years." Her virtues and talents attracted the notice and secured the confidence of George the Third and Queen Charlotte ; a notice and confi- dence she retained to the day of her death.

The editor's object in publishing this work is to give a true account of this once-admired lady ; and thus to remove the er- roneous impressions which certain apocryphal biographers have unhappily diffused. The materials out of which Lady Llanover has constructed her book consist of (at least) two unfinished MSS.—

" The autobiographical fragment which forms the commencement of the first volume, relates to her origin and earliest days, though it appears to have been written in the latter years of her life, as it was dictated to a con- fidential amanuensis; but the series of letters which form the second auto- biographical MSS., were addressed to her most intimate friend, the Duchess of Portland (Margaret Cavendish Harley). • * • * To render the chain of events more complete, the original letters of her uncle (George Lord Lansdowne) and other relations are introduced, in the course of her own biographical narrative, with those of Mary Granville herself to her mother and sister, after her first marriage."

The third volume ends with the death of this " sister of her heart" (whose married name was Mrs. Dewes), completing the narrative and correspondence of sixty-one years of the life of Mrs. Delany. " The beginning of what may be termed the third era of her existence, which was prolonged for twenty-eight years more, will, Lady Llanover intimates, form the commencement of the next volume ; " while " the latter part of the work will con- tain Mrs. Delany's own remarks on the court and private life of George III. and Queen Charlotte, of which she was so frequently an eyewitness until her own death in 1788."

There can be no reasonable objection to so amiable and clever a lady as the heroine of these memoirs having three or six eras in her objective existence, as our German friends might say, but we submit that three eras of subjective existence are hardly a fair allotment, unless her readers and reviewers are to have their ter- restrial lives augmented in proportion; and, really if there are to be so many voluminous biographies and autobiographies, we doubt if the extension (at any rate as regards the latter class) would be regarded as a boon. Mrs. Delany's correspondence already occu- pies 1891 pages, and only two eras of her existence are over. A third epoch remains, with 1891 more pages, looming awfully in the literary distance. The letters of which the present instalment of the work mainly consists have scarcely any but a personal and social interest. They illustrate no political crisis ; they exemplify no historical transactions; they touch on the literature of the eighteenth cen- tury in the most superficial and cursory manner. They are not rich in anecdote, they do not sparkle with wit, they are not re- markable for philosophical reflection. On the other hand, they are often clever, sometimes entertaining, and nearly always, per- haps, agreeably written. We now and then get a peep into the life of the age, as it mirrored itself in the mind of an accomplished English lady ; we hear some of the gossip of the men and women who lived as far back as Queen Anne's time. Occasionally, we have idyllic pictures, executed with simple natural grace, by the fair correspondent of many friends of social note or moral worth ; or we have descriptions of the costume of ladies, of their sayings and doings, their likes and dislikes. We are not insensible to the charm of plain unaffected writing, such as Mrs. Delany's usually ie ; and we like to hear the pleasant garrulity of some only half- conscious letter-writer, talking about common everyday things, till the week-day world of the past lives again for us, with its strength and weakness, its greatness and its insignificance, its triumphs and vanities. But, if we value this kind of epistolary history, we value it in proportion to its quality and not its quan- tity. A biography of Mrs. Delany, with selections from her letters, in two small volumes, that would preserve all that is essentially worth preserving, would be greatly preferable to this two-thousand-paged Life and Correspondence, reminding us of the bulky "Telephus," or the interminable " Orestes " of the Boman satirist that consumed the day with impunity.

" Impune diem consqmpserit ingens Telephus ? aut summi plena jam niargine libri Scriptus et in tergo necclum iinitus Orestes ? "

Such a book, however, we were not to have. But we pass from general criticism to a special report of the contents of the present work, substituting extracts as far as possible for comments. Here, to begin with, are some descriptive touches, with a bit of idyllic life running through them-

" Mr. Lloyd Hermes and Mr. Crofton is the genius of the grotto that we are erecting. About one half mile from hence there is a very pretty green hill, one side of it covered with nutwood; on the summit of the hill, there is a natural grotto with seats that will hold four people. We go every morn at seven o'clock to that place to adorn it with shells—the Bishop has a large collection of very fine ones ; Phil and I are the engineers ; the men fetch and carry for us what we want, and think themselves highly honoured. I forgot to tell you that from the grotto we have an extensive view of the sea and several islands ; and Killala is no small addition to the beauty of the prospect, not unlike a Roman obelisk of great height. The town is surrounded by trees, and looks as if it was in the middle of a wood. This affair yields us great diversion.; and, I believe will make us very strong and healthy, if rising early, exercise, and mirth Live any virtue. " . . . . When we came to the island, everyone took a way of his own ; my amusement was running after butterflies and gathering weed nosegays, of which there are great plenty; Phill sat down on a bank by the seaside and sting to the fish, got up in haste, when she thought it time to join her company, dropped her snuff-box on the sand, and did not recollect it till she was at home. The next day, we were to dine at Mrs. Lloyd's sister's, who lives four or five miles off; we went by sea ; passed the island ; Phill said she'd go and look for her box, as odd an undertaking as seeking a needle ; but she went, and found it. So we proceeded merrily to the place appointed, walked a mile or two on a very pleasant strand, and gathered a fresh recruat of shells for our grotto.

" . . . The budding of the trees, and spring nosegays that are carried about the streets, give me more pleasure than ever I felt at their approach before ; they tell me April is at hand, and that introdases a crowd of plea- sant thoughts."

Here is another sketch, but less poetical-

" We arrived at this place (Newton Gore), on Saturday, about nine o'clock; 'tis an old castle, patched up, and very irregular, but well fitted up, and good handsome rooms within. The master of the house, Sir Arthur Gore, a jolly, red-faced widower, has one daughter, a quiet thing, that lives in the house with him; dogs and horses are as dear to him as his chil- dren ; his laugh is heay, though his jests are coarse."

The most romantic episode in this Correspondence is the history of Miss Macdermot, written by Mrs. Delany ; the most humorous passage occurs in a letter from "A. G. to her friend Martha." The most informing paragraphs are, perhaps, to be found in Lady Llanover's own elucidatory annotations. ere is one of the last- " Walsh states that the Phenix Park derives its name by corruption from the native Irish name of the manor Fionn-nisge,' which signifies clear water, and applies to the chalybeate spring, near the vice-regal lodge. The word Fionn-insge' is properly pronounced Finnishe,' and has been corrupted by the English into Phosnix.' Lord Chesterfield, when Lord- Lieutenant of Ireland, erected the column, with the figure of 'the fabulous bird surmounting its capital, which has assisted in perpetrating this absurd misnomer.' " Among Mrs. Delany's and her sister's correspondents, was their uncle, Lord Lansdowne who, the year after the accession of George I., was sent to the Tower with Lord Oxford. It was he who coerced his niece, Mary, into her first marriage with Mr. Pendarves. In 1732, this nobleman thus addressed hisunmarried niece, Anne Granville- " I Cannot say that winter is over with us. As near as we are to Mid- summer Day, the cold rainy weather still obliges us to sit by a fireside. As God (they say) is in Gloucester, I hope he takes better care of you.' "

Of all Mrs. Delany's correspondents, the greatest was the Dean of St. Patrick's, the magnificent Swift, of whom some interesting anecdotes, but too long for citation, are communicated in them volumes. In one of his letters to her he says-

" It was impossible to answer your letter from Paradise [a place so named where Mrs. Pendarves was staying with her mother]—the old Grecians of Asia called every fine garden by that name; and, besides, when I consulted some friends, they conceived that, wherever you resided, that must needs be a paradise It is either a very low way of thinking, or as great a failure of education in either sex, to imagine that any man increases in his critical faculty in proportion to his wit and learning; it falls out always directly to the contrary. A common carpenter will work more cheerfully for a gentleman skilled in his trade than for a conceited fool who knows nothing of it. I must despise a lady who takes me for a pedant, and y ou have made me half angry with so many lines in your letter which look like a kind of apology for writing to me. Besides, to say the truth, the ladies in general are extremely mended both in writing and reading since I was young ; only it is to be hoped that, in proper time, gaming and dressing, with some other accomplishments, may reduce them to their native igno- ranee."

In the year 1755, Mrs. Delany read Mr. Dean Swift's account of his cousin the bean of St. Patrick's life and writings, a book which she was inclined to despise and laugh at, rather than re- sent : " However," she adds, " I could almost forgive him, for the copy of verses of Stella to Dr. Swift are exceedingly pretty,, which otherwise, perhaps, we should never have seen." Lad Llanover has considerately inserted this pleasing and tender poem, addressed by poor Stella to her " early and her only guide," on her birthday, the 30th of November, 1721. An extract from it will form a suitable conclusion to our present notice. We omit the italics.

" Such is the fate of female race, With no endowments but a face ; Before the thirtieth year of life— A maid forlorn, or hated wife. StelLi to you, her tutor, owes That she has ne'er resembled those ; Nor was a burden to mankind, With half her course of years behind. You taught how I might youth prolong, By knowing what was right and wrong ;

How from my heart to bring supplies Of lustre to my fading eyea; How soon a beauteous mind repairs The loss of changed or falling hairs ; How wit and virtue from within Send out a smoothness o'er the skin; Your lectures could my fancy fix, And 'I can please at thirty-six. Long be the day that gave you birth, Sacred to friendship, wit, and mirth ! Late dying, may you cast a shred Of your rich mantle on my head, To bear with dignity my sorrow One day alone, then die tomorrow !"