When she was barely fifteen her father forced her to marry Captain Maurice Farmer, whom she did not love and who gave way to such ungovernable fits of passion that he was generally supposed to be insane. After three years of married life that became more and more unendurable, she fled from him and refused ever after to live with him.

Notwithstanding the trials and sufferings she had experienced, her beauty now developed, and at eighteen she was esteemed the most beautiful woman in Dublin. Her portrait, painted by Sir Thomas Lawrence at this time, testifies to this judgment. Naturally she was not wanting in lovers, and she entered into a union with a Captain Jenkins, who would have married her had not the obstacle of a living husband prevented it. She was accepted by his family as his legal wife. Later she became acquainted with the Earl of Blessington, an Irish peer with an income of thirty thousand pounds a year.

Shortly after this Captain Farmer, while in a drunken debauch, jumped out of a window and broke his neck, and thus released the beauty from her marriage bonds. Thereupon the Earl of Blessington made her his countess, healing the wounded affections of Captain Jenkins with a cheek for ten thousand pounds.

The marriage took place in 1818, when Lady Blessington was in the perfection of her extraordinary beauty. Her sordid and equivocal past was over and her dazzling career began.

After years of poverty and straitened means, she now found herself surrounded by every imaginable luxury that almost unlimited wealth could purchase. The Earl of Blessington was a man of princely habits, a lover of the arts and of the intellectual as well as the more sensual pleasures of life. He bought pictures and gems and snuff-boxes and all manner of curious things, and his London mansion became noted for its magnificence and luxury. But London society looked askance at Lady Blessington's past, and she persuaded her husband to go abroad for a time. Two of her first and best books, "Travels in France" and "Travels in Italy," were the result of this expatriation. It was at Genoa, Italy, they met Lord Byron, with whom an intimacy was maintained during their sojourn. Lady Blessington preserved notes of her conversations with Lord Byron which she afterward published, and a very agreeable book it is to read. Until his death four years later Lord Byron corresponded with her.

At Florence her friendship with Walter Savage

Landor began, and this was only terminated with her death. "The old pagan," as Carlyle calls him, was one of Lady Blessington's sincerest and most steadfast admirers. His letters to her show how implicitly he made her his confidant, for he, too, had his troubles and his miseries.

In Paris Lord Blessington set up an establishment of great magnificence, but he did not live long enough to enjoy it. He died in 1829, leaving his countess her jointure only of twentyfive hundred pounds a year and his London mansion.

Meantime the Count d'Orsay had married the daughter of the Earl of Blessington by his first wife, and D'Orsay thus became a part of the Blessington household. Into that episode it is not necessary to enter here.

After the death of the earl, Lady Blessington returned to London, and the Blessington mansion being too expensive to maintain on her present income, she took Gore House, where she held sway for nearly twenty years. To eke out her income she wrote several books and contributed to the annuals and magazines of the day. After some years the income from the Blessington estate failed her, and she soon became swamped in debt. On this account she and the Count

d'Orsay were at last compelled to fly from England. This was early in 1849.

Gore House and its magnificent treasures went to the hammer and were sacrificed at a tithe of their value. Her exile proved to be of short duration. She died suddenly in Paris, June 4, 1849. She was in her sixtieth year.

FELICIA HEMANS.

(1794-1835.)

FEW Poets have been more popular in their lifetime than Felicia Hemans, nor is she yet entirely forgotten. She has and in all probability will retain that literary fame that goes with school books, and as long as boys declaim the story of Casabianca," or "The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers," so long will her name be a household word. Her more ambitious writings, her plays and stories in verse are forgotten, but her name is associated with some of the best-remembered lyrics in the language and they still keep her memory green.

Of her longer poems "The Forest Sanctuary" may be read even in these days with something more than a languid interest, and it contains one very sweet song that has long held its place in our hymn-books.

Ave Sanctissima !

'Tis nightfall on the sea;