known of the life of this beloved Princess, but to tell of her confinement and death is a painful task, believing, as I do, that she was sacrificed to the vanity of her accoucheur and the ignorance of the ladies around her. Had she been a peasant's wife, she would in all probability have lived to be a happy mother.

It had always been customary for two accoucheurs to share the responsibility of a royal birth, but the vanity and ambition of Sir Richard Croft, made him request to be the only one employed, and when it proved a very protracted labor, he was so weighed down by the responsibility he had assumed, as to be wholly unequal to the exigencies of the case. No one thought of sustaining the Princess's strength either by food or stimulants, and soon after she was delivered of a still-born child, she sank away into the arms of death.

Her previous good health and fine spirits, had prevented any one from feeling any apprehensions of the approaching crisis, and the news of her death came like a thunder-clap upon the nation. One wail of sorrow went through the land. Never was a royal personage more universally regretted, or more deeply lamented. No need of orders for a general mourning; the poorest laborer wore some badge of it, and in all public assemblages nothing but black was seen.

It was

put on, too, on hearing of her death, instead of waiting till she was buried.

The afflicted husband tried to escape from the forms of court etiquette, and all the heartless ceremonials which belonged to the occasion, by shutting himself up in her favorite sitting-room, where they had passed together their last happy hours, and when obliged to quit it, he locked the door and kept the key, lest something of hers should be moved. Her hat and cloak were on a fire-screen, just where she had thrown them on returning from her last walk, and when I visited the house, twelve months after her death, that room was still shut up, and nothing in it had been removed.

She was, according to custom, buried at midnight, by torchlight, and I well remember sitting up in my bed to listen to the tolling of the parish bell, on that night, when all the other churchbells throughout the United Kingdom were sending forth the same solemn tones. She was buried in St. George's Chapel, Windsor, and the coffin was let down slowly through the floor into a vault underneath. Prince Leopold, as chief mourner, was seated at the head of the coffin, and was so absorbed in grief, that he did not perceive that they were lowering the coffin, until he raised his head and found it gone. A brother of mine was watching him at the time, and said the start he

gave, and the gesture of abandonment to sorrow, were most expressive and touching.

That same brother set on foot a subscription for a national monument to the memory of the Princess. No one was allowed to give more than a guinea, so as to make it the people's doing, and the result of that contribution is the grand monument to her memory in St. George's Chapel.

W

CHAPTER XXV.

HANNAH MORE'S CONVERT.

HEN I was a young girl, I was constantly hearing the praises of Miss Hannah More. Everybody had read, or was reading, her religious novel of "Colebs in Search of a Wife," and I used to listen with interest to the accounts given of her great popularity among the wits who flourished at the close of the last century and the beginning of this. I heard, with wonder, of her being the intimate friend of the great actor, Garrick, the favorite companion, the petted darling, of the great moralist, Dr. Johnson, and an honored member of a select literary club, jocosely called le bas bleu.* She was also the author of a tragedy called "Percy," which had a great success in London, and once had the pleasure of seeing Mrs. Siddons perform in it, whilst Garrick sat beside her, delighted both with the play and its author.

Miss More made one of a circle of highly cultivated, refined, and amiable persons who knew

* From the color of the stockings of Admiral Boscawen, who was one of its members.

how to enjoy each others' society in the best manner, and her letters from London to her sisters in Bristol, give a charming account of her easy intercourse with the highest nobility, the greatest statesmen, the most gifted artists, the best writers, in prose and verse, of both sexes, with many delightful persons of fine conversational powers and perfect hostesses, who knew exactly whom to bring together, and how to make the most of their guests' talents and graces. It seemed to me afterwards, on reading the Life of Miss More, by Roberts, that there never was before, and never has been since, such a brilliant society as that in which she moved as one of its greatest ornaments, loved and caressed by all. Besides this circle of beaux esprits, who were her intimate friends, she was occasionally drawn into the vortex of fashionable life, and unwillingly made one in the crowded assemblies of the great. The follies and vices of the gay world could not escape her observation, and she had the moral courage to attack them in a little work entitled "Thoughts on the Manners of the Great."

At the time when I first heard of Hannah More, she had retired from that brilliant society which she had so long enjoyed, and was devoting her time and talents to the improvement of the world in Christian morals. The extensive circulation of Colebs prepared the public to receive