Sometimes at the theatre to be seen and saluted by all, sometimes at the palace to be honoured by the King's brother as his countrywoman, sometimes in correspondence with scientific men, and hearing of their achievements, she maintained to the last her cheerful interest in life. Though her eyesight was failing, and she could "hardly find the line again she had just been tracing by feeling on paper," her nephew writes of her in 1832, "She runs about the town with me, and skips up her two pair of stairs as light and fresh at least as some folks I could name, who are not a fourth part of her age. . . . In the morning till eleven or twelve she is dull and weary, but as the day advances she gains life, and is quite 'fresh and funny' at ten or eleven p.m., and sings old rhymes, nay, even dances! to the great delight of all who see her." It is such a picture of four score as Cicero would have been overjoyed to prefix as a frontispiece to his treatise on "Old Age," had it been available in his day. She spoke in her usual spirit of drollery of "her brittle constitution," and looked for it going to pieces in the great heats of summer fourteen years before it did. "My complaint is incurable," she says, "for it is a decay of nature. . . . What a shocking idea it is to be decaying! decaying! But, never mind—if I am decaying here, there will be as Mrs. Maskelyne once was comforting me (on observing my growing lean) the less corruption in my grave!" But, in view of the end, it is always to "the best and dearest of brothers," to her "dear nephew," and to her namesake, his little daughter, that her thoughts revert. She enjoyed the present; she revelled and lived in the past. "I have now received in all five letters," she writes to Lady
