day!—some of whole sheets of paper filled with lies about me, to say that I was a mean wretch, that I was coquette, and should be more so, that my playing so well was and would be a temptation to bring all the rakes in town about me, that it had been so thus far of my life, and that I was treated so familiarly by the rakish part of the town, that one night at a play, my Lord Wharton said to my Lord Dorchester, "Now that the opera is done, let's go and hear Molly Clavering play it over again" (which was all a plain lie, for I never did play in any public company, and only at home, when anybody that visited my Aunt Wood, with whom I lived, asked me; and for those two lords, I had never been in a room with either of them in my whole life).

'These,' continues the Diarist, are only specimens of what lies they invented to hurt me. At last, when they thought they had routed me by the ill impressions they had falsely given of me, upon a day when my lord was at the House of Lords, one Mr. Mason, of the House of Commons, came to him and told him that Mrs. Weedon (a client of my brother's that had a foul cause in the Court of Delegates) desired to speak with him. My lord at first refused, but at length she teased him so much, that he consented to see her; and by her appointment, and saying she had a very fine lady to recommend to him (which gave him a thought he should find out his correspondent), he waited upon her at Mrs. Kirk's, which was the place appointed. He had some little jealousy before he went that the fine

lady was Lady Harriet Vere, for she and Mrs. Kirk had always been in a hackney-coach every Sunday for at least a month to ogle him, and pass and repass his coach when he went and came from the chapel. He found he was right; for there she was, set out in all her airs, with her elbow upon a table that had two wax-candles on it, and holding her head, which she said ached. There she displayed herself, and so did her two artificers, and not a word said of the cause. This interview brought on several others, and those visits from my lord to Mrs. K. and Mrs. W., to try to make this match. They told him that the queen had promised Lady H. £100,000 when she married. He said upon that score he durst not presume to marry her, for he had not an estate to make a settlement answerable to so great a fortune; and at last they pressed him so much, that he owned he was engaged to me, and that it would be barbarous to ruin an innocent young woman, who had no fault but receiving his visits so long. They could not agree with him that it was barbarous, for it was only serving me in my own kind, for I was contracted to Mr. Floyd, whom I had left for him. My lord said they were mistaken in that affair (which he knew full well). However, this did not discourage them; and once, when he seemed to yield, he brought Mrs. Kirk to confess the pains they had been at to bring this about; and she mentioned particularly the letters, which were contrived and writ at her house, and copied afterwards by Lady H. V. herself. As soon as my lord had got this confession, he

wrote to Lady H., in answer to a love-letter from her (for she pretended to be terribly in love with him), to excuse himself, and say that he resolved to marry me, for now he was assured that he had met with a wife whose conduct was unblemished; for that the greatest enemy I had in the world had been writing every day an invective against me, which was duly sent to him; and that, now all the letters were laid out before him, he did not find anything I was accused of but of playing the best upon the harpsichord of any woman in England, which was so far from being a fault, that it was an argument to him that I had been used to employ many of my hours alone, and not in the company of rakes, as they would suggest. But they thought there was hope, since they did not believe that we were actually married; and my lord could never get quit of their importunity till he owned our marriage to them, though it was before he owned it publicly; and even after that both Mrs. K. and Lady H. V. wrote frequently to him. This I had not inserted but as a justification for my endeavouring to hinder her coming into the princess's bedchamber.'

The history of the Diary is singular. It was commenced by Lady Cowper, in her own capacity of Lady of the Bedchamber, and she undertook to write down all the events worth remembering while she was at court, as a corrective to 'the perpetual lies that one hears' there. Had this Diary remained complete as written, and still more if re

vised and digested as she intended, it would have been a still more valuable contribution to history, and still more important as a record of the social aspects of the time. If Lady Cowper does not fill up this blank completely, it is simply because the greater portion of her Diary was destroyed by herself, under a misplaced apprehension, at the time when Lord Cowper was falsely accused of complicity in Layer's plot. What remains, however, which is somewhat more than Lord Campbell had before him when he was writing the life of the Lord Chancellor himself, nevertheless covers the two principal passages in the reign of the first George, and the most critical perils of the Hanoverian dynasty. The rebellion of 1715 on the one hand, and on the other the quarrel between the king and the prince, which jeopardized the interests' of the Revolution by shaking the stability of the throne, are both included and illustrated in this Diary. Moreover, Lord Campbell, who saw the major part of it in MS., justly describes it as a charming production, and adds that it well deserves to be printed, for it gives a more lively picture of the Court of England at the commencement of the Brunswick dynasty than he had ever met with; in which sense we ourselves regard it, though unhappily, for the reasons we have mentioned, it is so brief and fragmentary.

THE SIEGE OF LATHOM HOUSE.

HIS ancient manor-house, which became the scene of one of the most memorable sieges recorded in our history, was situated in the township of Chapelrig of Lathom, which, at the Domesday survey, belonged to Orm, a Saxon, from whom the parish of Ormskirk, in the county of Lancaster, derives its name. His descendant, Robert Fitzhenry of Lathom, founded the Priory of Burscough in the reign of Richard I., and may be regarded as the Rodolph of the race of Lathom. His grandson, Sir Robert de Lathom, greatly augmented his inheritance by his marriage with Arnicia, sister and co-heir of Thomas Lord of Alfreton and Norton; and his son and successor, a knight like his father, still further added to his patrimony by winning the rich heiress of Sir Thomas de Knowsley, who brought him the fair lordship which to this day continues to be the princely residence of her descendants, the Earls of Derby. The eventual heiress of the Lathoms, Isabella, daughter of Sir Thomas de Lathom, married Sir John Stanley; and henceforward, for several