r title.

Lord Houghton has now passed through some sixty London seasons, during
which he has been more or less acquainted with nearly every social and
literary celebrity in the English metropolis. Having regard to this
circumstance, and the fact of his possessing a polished and graceful
style of expressing himself, one would naturally expect a great deal
from this volume of reminiscences. Nor will such expectations be
entirely disappointed. The monographs are eight in number, and will be
read with varying degrees of interest, according to the taste of
the reader, as well as the subjects and quality of the papers. The
portrait which will perhaps be the newest to American readers is that
of Harriet, Lady Ashburton, wife of the second Baring who bore that
title. Lady Ashburton was daughter of the earl of Sandwich, and Lord
Houghton says of her: "She was an instance in which aristocracy gave
of its best and showed at its best, although she may have owed little
to the qualities she inherited from an irascible race and to an
unaffectionate education"--a sentence reminding us of a remark in
the London _Times_, that "with certain noble houses people are apt
to associate certain qualities--with the Berkeleys, for instance, a
series of disgraceful family quarrels." Lady Ashburton appears to us
from this account to have been a brilliant spoilt child of fortune,
who availed herself of her great social position to do and say what,
had she remained Lady Harriet Montagu with the pittance of a poor
nobleman's daughter, she would hardly have dared to do or say. It
is one of the weak points of society in England that a woman who has
rank, wealth, and ability, and contrives to surround herself with men
of wit to whom she renders her house delightful, can be as hard and
rude as she pleases to the world in general. Fortunately, in most
cases native kindness of heart usually hurries to heal the wound that
"wicked wit" may have made. This would scarcely seem to have been so
with Lady Ashburton, for Lord Houghton tells us that "many who would
not have cared for a quiet defeat shrank from the merriment of her
victory," one of them saying, "I do not mind being knocked down, but
I can't stand being danced upon afterward." Lord Houghton,
however, defines this "jumping" as "a joyous sincerity that no
conventionalities, high or low, could restrain--a festive nature
flowing through the artificial soil of elevated life." And it must be
owned that th