he talked like
an angel, but her views upon poetry as a calling in life, shocked me
not a little. She said she preferred a mariage de convenance to a love
match, because it generally turned out better. "This surprises you," she
said, smiling, "but then I suppose I am the least romantic person that
ever wrote plays." She was much more proud of her plays, even then
well-nigh forgotten, than of the works by which she was well known,
and which at that time brought people from the ends of the earth to see
her....

'Nothing ever destroyed her faith in those she loved. If I had not known
all about him from my own folk I should have thought her father had been
a patriot and a martyr. She spoke of him as if there had never been such
a father--which in a sense was true.'

Mr. Payn quotes Miss Mitford's charming description of K., 'for whom
she had the highest admiration.' 'K. is a great curiosity, by far the
cleverest woman in these parts, not in a literary way [this was not to
disappoint me], but in everything that is useful. She could make a Court
dress for a duchess or cook a dinner for a Lord Mayor, but her principal
talent is shown in managing everybody whom she comes near. Especially
her husband and myself; she keeps the money of both and never allows
either of us to spend sixpence without her knowledge.... You should see
the manner in which she makes Ben reckon with her, and her contempt for
all women who do not manage their husbands.'

Another delightful quotation is from one of Charles Kingsley's letters
to Mr. Payn. It brings the past before us from another point of view.

'I can never forget the little figure rolled up in two chairs in the
little Swallowfield room, packed round with books up to the ceiling--the
little figure with clothes on of no recognised or recognisable pattern;
and somewhere, out of the upper end of the heap, gleaming under a great
deep globular brow, two such eyes as I never perhaps saw in any other
Englishwoman--though I believe she must have had French blood in her
veins to breed such eyes and such a tongue, the beautiful speech which
came out of that ugly (it was that) face, and the glitter and depth too
of the eyes, like live coals--perfectly honest the while....' One would
like to go on quoting and copying, but here my preface must cease, for
it is but a preface after all, one of those many prefaces written out of
the past and when everything is over.

COUNTRY PICTURES.

Of all s