two hundred and twenty-five; ten years later, he informed me that his collection had increased to one thousand two hundred and fifty, but that he was deterred by the bulk from printing a complete list, though his MS. catalogue had been accurately kept up. He contemplated the publication of a "mere list," and requested my assistance in the matter; but he died before the design was carried out, and this department of bibliography sustained a loss, which will not speedily be supplied from other quarters. It was rumoured that Sir William had left behind him an autobiographic account of the more noteworthy incidents of his own time, including facts not hitherto known, relating to the Melbourne-Norton episode. Will they ever see the light?
I have spoken of Mrs. Norton as one of the "Three Graces," an appellation by which the daughters of Thomas Sheridan were known in the morning of their beauty. Of the others, the elder, Helen Selina, whom many would rank above her sister in the tenderness and refinement of lyric verse, married, firstly Lord Dufferin, and secondly the Earl of Gifford; while the younger, Jane Georgina, became the wife of Edward Adolphus, twelfth Duke of Somerset, and is still remembered by grey-beards as the "Queen of Beauty" at the Eglingtoun Tournament.
Within a few hours of the death of Lady Stirling-Maxwell, and to a month or two, at the same age, died a lady whose life, " passed in a frugal, poor, and peaceful home," offers a remarkable contrast to the brilliant, but unrestful, career of her contemporary. This was Miss Mary Carpenter, of Bristol, so well known for the active part she had taken in the reformatory movement, and in the promotion of "ragged schools," and female education. It hardly falls within my scope to attempt anything like a Plutarchian Σύγκρισις, or comparison between these ladies of such diverse paths in life; so I refer my reader to the wise and witty Punch, for June 30th, 1877, in which through a score of admirable quatrains the contrast is depicted.
Shakespeare, jealously dogging the footfall of Time, implored him to pass his mistress by, and leave her beauty unmarred,—
"Oh! carve not with thy hours my love's fair brow,
Nor write rude lines there with thine antique pen."
Some such adjuration, one would think, had reached the ear of the unstaying one, since, despite the fifty years that had slipped away, O Posthumus, since Maclise traced in Fraser her lovely face and graceful form, the lineaments of our Corinna are still beautiful as seen in her later portraits. Those of T. Carrick and J. Hayter, in earlier life, are before me; and there is a marble bust, executed in London so far back as 1832, by an admirable sculptor, my friend, Peter Hollins, still happily alive among us in his native Birmingham, of which the best praise would be that it was worthy of the original. (Appendix D.)
The following exquisitely polished lines, with which I cannot resist the temptation to round off this notice, were written by Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton:—
"THE HON. MRS. NORTON.
"The queenly spirit of a Star
That longed to tread the earth,
Passed into mortal mould,—the hour
Made holy by thy birth;
