er hand. The revelations of the past, the sorrows of
the present, were too much for her to bear, and she died. Lady Rachel
Russell, writing from Woburn Abbey at the time, states her conviction
that Lady Bedford's reason would not have sustained the shock received
from the contents of the pamphlet, even had her physical powers rallied.

Turning aside one moment from our subject, we stand in awe before the
striking contrast presented by the characters of two women, each so
closely linked with Lady Bedford's life,--the one who heard her first
breath, and the other who received her last sigh. If Lady Somerset
causes us to shrink with horror from the depth of depravity of which
woman's nature is capable, let us thank God that in Lady Rachel Russell
we have a witness of the purity, self-sacrifice, and holiness a true
woman's soul can attain.

In the library at Wilton House, the seat of the Sidneys, we were shown a
lock of Queen Elizabeth's hair, hidden for more than a hundred years in
one of the books. A day came when some member of the family took down an
old volume to see what treasures of wisdom lurked therein. "She builded
better than she knew," for between the leaves lay folded a paper which
contained a faded lock of the once proud Queen Bess. How it came there,
and by whose hand it was placed in the book, is one of the invisible
things of the library, but the writing within the paper authenticated
the relic beyond doubt; and it is now shown as one of the visible
treasures of the library of Wilton House.

Magdalen College, Cambridge, contains the Pepysian Library,--placed
there by the will of Pepys, under stringent conditions, in default of
whose fulfilment the bequest falls to Trinity. One of the fellows of
Magdalen is always obliged to mount guard over visitors to the library.
Such an escort being provided, we ascended the stairs, and found
ourselves in the presence of the bookcases which once adorned Pepys's
house in London, containing the "three thousand bookes" of which he was
so proud. The bookcases are handsome, with small mirrors let into them,
in which, doubtless, Mrs. Pepys often surveyed the effect of those
"newegownes" which pleased her husband's vanity so well, although he
rather reluctantly paid the cost. There, too, is the original manuscript
of that entertaining Diary, wherein Pepys daguerrotyped the age in which
he lived, and himself with all his sense and nonsense. That Diary would
have remained one o