the family of the first Lord Hatherton (then Mr. Littleton), where Miss Anna Murphy was very fortunate in her pupils. A little play which she wrote for the Littleton children was her next literary effort, and the miniatures of Lord Hatherton's daughters, painted by her, still hang on the walls of the schoolroom where she presided for four years. She left Teddesley to be married to Robert Jameson, and to begin life in earnest in Chenies Street, Tottenham Court Road. The 'new husband and wife were,' says her biographer, ' of kindred ' tastes and accomplishments, fond of literature and of cultivated society, and, though not rich, of sufficiently good prospects to justify their union in a time not quite so exacting in this respect as the present.' Yet these conditions did not, unfortunately, suffice to make it a happy one, or to produce one of those perfect unions of which Balzac said that it is une fleur solitaire and very difficult to find.

The niece who owed so much to Mrs. Jameson's tenderness, and who has written her memoir, which she did not live to publish, says as little as may be of the discomforts of this illassorted union, perhaps because she had learned few of the secrets of the prison-house, since Anna would be slow to reveal to anyone so much younger than herself how her grand illusion had vanished, and been replaced by the bitterness of neglect. We shall imitate Mrs. Macpherson's reticence, though there are friends of Mrs. Jameson's, and also of Robert Jameson's, still living, who could throw a good deal of light upon the painful story of those divided lives. There is an Eastern legend which tells how four men, by connivance of the angel gate-keepers, once entered Paradise. One only came in peace and left in peace; of the rest, one saw and went mad, one saw and died, and one destroyed all the young plants along his way. From the first Mr. Jameson seems to have done this; from the first the wife was rudely neglected, and the authoress urged to make capital out of her talents. Ere long Anna went to live with her sister, Mrs. Bate, and Mr. Jameson went to take employment in Dominica. In 1833 he again returned to England, and they remained together in London till the following spring, when, another and a more hopeful appointment having been secured for him, Mr. Jameson set out alone for Canada.

Literary engagements had meanwhile increased upon his wife, and Mrs. Jameson planned and carried out a Continental expedition for objects connected with her career. She travelled in Germany, and there found the welcome she deserved as the author of the Essay on the Heroines of Shakespeare.' The

most careful, original, and beautiful of her books was already popular there, and Tieck, the literary giant of Dresden, must have considered her as a foeman worthy of his steel, as well as a woman of his regard, for his manuscript criticisms on her book are still legible on the pages of the copy which is preserved in the library of the British Museum. Goethe died the year before Mrs. Jameson reached Weimar, but she found there his daughter-in-law, Ottilie von Goethe, still occupying the well-known Goethisches Haus,' and a close intimacy sprang up between these two ladies. Here too and in Dresden Mrs. Jameson enjoyed intercourse with Retzsch, with Dannecker, with Madame Devrient, and with Schlegel, the Castelforte' of Madame de Staël's Corinne,' whose volubility and lively egotism bored Byron, stunned Schiller, and teased Goethe, while it certainly amused Mrs. Jameson not a little.

During all these months the home in Canada, to which Anna looked forward whenever her husband should be fairly established in his new position, seemed further off than ever. She wrote from Germany to her father, with whom her relations always remained very close and very endearing, that she had had a letter from Canada-as usual very well written, very cold, and very vague;' but this vagueness gave place at times to words of great bitterness on the part of both husband and wife. Two of the letters here published are among the saddest things we ever read, and the conviction which Mr. Jameson expressed, and Mrs. Jameson endorsed, viz. that they would have been happier had each of them been united to any other person, must have given greater poignancy to Anna's grief when in 1834 Mr. Murphy's health began to break. He had always followed the steps of his daughter's career, and shared some of her labours. In 1814, when holding the appointment of painter in enamel to the Princess Charlotte, he made an exquisite set of copies of the collection of portraits known as the Windsor 'Beauties,' and used to tell his children how the princesses were wont to visit him at his work.

'Mr. Murphy had also the honour of submitting the first eight portraits of the series to the late Queen Charlotte, and she not only expressed her satisfaction in the most gracious terms, but ordered it to be conveyed to him by General Taylor. Mr. Murphy took the liberty of asking her Majesty whether she recollected the famous picture of "Nell Gwynn" known to have once existed in the Windsor Gallery. (It should be observed that Queen Charlotte was suspected of having, from peculiar notions of propriety, removed this picture.) The Queen replied at once that most assuredly since she had resided at Windsor there had been no "Nell Gwynn" there! It is not to be supposed that Queen Charlotte could have intended anything beyond a mere

statement of facts by such an equivocal reply; but it caught the fancy and memory of the Irish artist, always ready to see a joke, and he carried home the unintentional repartee to his girls with much merriment.'

When the painter's share of the work was finished his daughter's began, and Mrs. Jameson, ten years later, furnished the letterpress for this volume, thus giving to her intercourse with Mr. Murphy all the pleasures of joint authorship. From the illness with which the poor miniature painter was now afflicted his health never really rallied, though his life was prolonged for some years, till he had seen Anna in the meridian of her success, and also, as we shall see, in the crisis of her domestic troubles,

Mrs. Jameson had just given to the world her pleasant volumes of Sketches at Home and Abroad,' and planned another visit to Germany, when she was summoned to join her husband on the other side of the Atlantic. We have seen that, when he first left her, she complained of his want of zeal in making arrangements for their establishment in Canada; but now that the hour had come, it must be confessed that she obeyed his summons with reluctance. She was leaving the work and the position she had earned for herself, and a home in her sister's house where she was worshipped and cherished, for an unknown country and a hearth which had grown all the more strange to her, as her husband had sometimes allowed six months to pass without giving any signs of interest in her.

The result of her visit to him was most unsatisfactory. Mr. Jameson, advised by his friends that he must either keep his wife under his roof, or make her an allowance, had summoned her to join him, and Mrs. Jameson, clinging to her sense of duty, and advised by the same friends that her absence might be prejudicial to his character and professional interests, went to him: but they had no pleasure in meeting. Other and less regular ties had been formed in her absence; the distant, uncultivated country struck a chill into her heart; their union remained a childless one; she writhed under the neglect with which she was treated; she was ill and dispirited, suffered greatly from the cold, and, as she said, was dying for news from her ' dear home,' for I had met no familiar face, no look of wel6 come, and I was as sad at heart as a woman can be. For 'God's sake, write to me.' She roused herself, however, and, wishing to try how to make her live liveable, she began to occupy herself with the local question of education. She also wrote home vivid pictures of the scenery and politics of the

land of her exile. Mr. Jameson was made Chancellor, and his wife thus expressed herself:-'He is now at the top of the 'tree, and has no more to expect or aspire to. I think he will 'make an excellent Chancellor; he is gentlemanlike, cautious, ' and will stick to precedents, and his excessive reserve is here ⚫ the greatest possible of virtues. No one loves him, it is true, but every one approves him.' From these lines it would appear that the Chancellor's wife had rather too little reserve. One can only hope that her husband never had the opportunity of reading them; but the reader, after doing so, will not be surprised to learn that she had already made up her mind to leave him and to return to England. She wrote that neither duty nor necessity could now oblige her to endure more of what she had endured, and that, for the future, her life would be more easy, and her conscience more free, for the attempt she had made. This dreary experiment ended in October, 1837, and her intercourse with her husband, who allowed her three hundred a year, was thenceforth carried on only by correspondence; but the letters, which grew less and less frequent, had, like the allowance, ceased altogether before Mr. Jameson's death in 1854.

It would be unfair to omit to mention here the journey into the least known regions of Canada which Mrs. Jameson made before taking leave of her husband and of his Transatlantic home. The energy she displayed, the fatigues she endured, and the insight which she thus gained, not only into the haunts of the Red men, but into the wants and difficulties of British emigrants, were every way characteristic of her, as was the spirit with which she made this expedition at a crisis in her life which would have broken a more delicate heart. The publication of these sketches brought her into communication with Miss Martineau, and added, in many ways, to Mrs. Jameson's circle of readers.

But as yet she had been little more than tentative in her work. Its real development and its lasting fruits were to come, and to be the results of that solitary position and of the leisure in which the rest of her life must be passed.

She adopted her niece Gerardine Bate, took a cottage near London, and applied herself to the study of art. She wrote in 1840: Though there is much to be done and endured, I cannot say I am unhappy. My mind is serene, and I ' am so engrossed by the affairs, interests, and sufferings of others, I have no time to think about myself. Besides, I ⚫ have just undertaken a new book-a laborious thing which 'will pay me well, and must be finished as soon as possible.'

The subject to which Anna Jameson meant now to devote her time, her talents, and her opportunities, was one which was beginning to receive great attention in England.

It was at the latter part of the eighteenth century that a great revival of art took place in England. The convulsions and wars which followed the French Revolution caused a great number of the finest works of art in Europe to be sent to this country, which were eagerly purchased. In the reign of George IV. forty-eight great private collections already bore witness to the taste and wealth of English gentlemen and connoisseurs; dilettantism became the fashion; Sir Thomas Lawrence caused 40,000l. to be expended upon drawings by the old masters, while the acquisition of the Elgin marbles early in the new century stamped it as a new era in the training of the British school. From this time progress was rapid. Collectors bequeathed their treasures to the nation. The National Gallery had been begun by the purchase of the Angerstein pictures, and soon increased in importance. Taste was in fashion, and it must have its literature, its exponents, its commentaries, and even its ladders to learning.' But the extent and variety of these private and public collections were very imperfectly known when Mrs. Jameson, encouraged by the patronage of Lord Lansdowne and other connoisseurs, undertook to produce a full account of these scattered treasures.

6

Mrs. Macpherson says of Mrs. Jameson's new work: 'It was the compiling of an elaborate catalogue raisonné, or a companion and guide to the various private art collections to which the public obtained admission in London, and it was, I believe, a successful speculation for the publisher.' Its success acted as a spur to the author's activity.

Mrs. Jameson undertook, for the Penny Magazine,' a series of articles on the early Italian painters, and those papers, when collected into a single volume, soon received the compliment of a French translation. The book possessed eminently what the translator would have called the defects of its qualities.' It was picturesque, enthusiastic, and spirited, lacked a sufficiently objective view of art, and was often weak and discursive where it might easily have been made both more technical and more exhaustive. In this way it is more a pleasant book for the drawing-room table than a useful companion in a picture-gallery. It had also some very strange lacunes, as in its omission of Sandro Botticelli, than whom no pupil of Lippi's and no master of his day less deserves to be forgotten. On the walls of the Sistine chapel he proved