ears
her senior; but he made her his bride, though he left her a widow within
a year of their nuptial-day.

Since Catherine Stephens wore her coronet--and before--many an actress
has found in the stage-door a portal to the Peerage. Elizabeth Farren,
who was cradled in the year before George III came to his Throne, was
the daughter of a gifted and erratic Irishman, who abandoned pills and
potions to lead the life of a strolling actor, a career which came to a
premature end while his daughter was still a child. Fortunately for
Elizabeth, her mother was a woman of capacity and character, who made a
gallant struggle to give her children as good a start in life as was
possible to her straitened means; and by the time she was fourteen the
girl, who had inherited her father's passion for the stage, was able to
make a most creditable first appearance at Liverpool, as Rosetta, in
Bickerstaff's _Love in a Village._

So adept did she prove in her adopted art that within four years she
made her curtsy at the Haymarket as Miss Hardcastle, in _She Stoops to
Conquer_; and at once, by her grace and brilliant acting, won the hearts
of theatre-going London; while her refinement, at that time by no means
common on the stage, and her social graces won for her a welcome in high
circles. Many a lover of title or eminence sought the hand of the
sparkling and lovely Irishwoman, and none of them all was more ardent in
his wooing than Charles James Fox, then at the zenith of his career as
statesman; but she would have naught to say to any one of them all. Her
fate, however, was not long in coming; and it came in the form of Edward
Stanley, twelfth Earl of Derby, who, before his first wife, a daughter
of the Duke of Hamilton, had been many months in the family-vault, was
at the knees of the beautiful actress. He had little difficulty in
persuading her to become his Countess; and one May day, in 1797, he
placed the wedding-ring on her finger in the drawing-room of his
Grosvenor Square house.

For more than thirty years Lady Derby moved in her new circle, a
splendid and gracious figure, received at Court with special favour by
George III and his Queen, before she died in 1829, transmitting her
blood, through her daughter, Lady Mary Stanley, to the Earl of Wilton of
to-day.

While my Lady Derby was still new to her dignities, Eliza O'Neill was
beginning to prattle in the most charming brogue ever heard across the
Irish Channel, and to grow thro