never afterwards gave her the least trouble. It is impossible to form any judgment of her merit in this transaction without having known her feminine manners, character, and figure. She told me that before she had recourse to this stratagem, in a little apothecary's shop which she kept for the benefit of the poor, furnished with shelves, she was obliged to put the laudanum upon the upper shelf, that the motion of going up the step-ladder to get at it might make her change so desperate a resolution. When her husband died she had too much experience ever to become a slave again, and she refused two or three of the most respectable marriages Ireland afforded. Her husband left her the means of devoting herself to public charities of different kinds, an account of which deserves to be collected for an example to her sex; with all which she mixed decency, hospitality, and elegance in house and table as well as a variety of innocent resources. She frequently told me it was all owing to order. I am determined if I live a very few years to collect everything I can about her, for her life deserves much better to be examined and recorded than that of Madame de Maintenon or Madame Roland, or even Catherine II. of Russia, if it was not for the public events originating from the vices and crimes of the last personage. As to morals, whoever knows anything of Ireland knows how rare they are in any rank of life. In England they are much oftener to be met with among the middling classes, who are obliged to be active and diligent to make their own and their children's fortune, than among the higher classes, whose fortunes are made and who have no motive for exertion except ambition, which may be one case in a hundred. In Ireland there was, at that time at least, no middling class, and the manners of the better sort were, and still are, justly proverbial.
"From the time I was four years old till I was fourteen, my education was neglected to the greatest degree. I was first sent to an ordinary publick school. I was then shut up with a private tutor, my father and mother being in England. My tutor was a narrow-minded
