By the Rev. Canon J. E. Jackson, F.S.d. 39 



that left. She came dressed in deep mourning, attended by four 

 young ladies in white, as maids of honour. The end of it was that 

 she was found guilty ; but it so happened that, after all, this had 

 no effect upon her fortune, for it was found that the Duke's will had 

 been so carefully worded that they could not disturb it. The 

 magazines of the day record many of her doings, which do not at 

 all appear to have been of a vicious kind, but rather those of a very 

 wealthy lady, who was at the same time very eccentric and very 

 fond of publicity. 



The village of Box, about the end of the last century, was the 

 home of the Bowdler family. Thomas Bowdler, the father, was 

 the editor of a work now out of print, but one that ought to be re- 

 printed, "The Family Shakespeare," in which the vulgar rubbish 

 stuffed in by the players or even by the author himself, to please 

 " the ears of the groundlings,'^ is cut out, and the work rendered 

 more capable of being read out aloud in families. Mr. Bowdler 

 had two daughters, Jane and Henrietta Maria, both of a literary 

 turn. One of them wrote " Poems," which reached a sixteenth 

 edition, the other some religious works and biography. 



About the same time lived a lady of popular reputation, Mrs. 

 Delany, born at Coulston, near Earlstoke. She was of the family 

 of Granville, Lord Lansdown, and married Mr. Delany, an Irish 

 clergyman. She was literary and accomplished, corresponded with 

 Dean Swift, and was an intimate friend of Margaret Cavendish 

 Harley, Duchess of Portland (celebrated by Prior as " my noble, 

 lovely little Peggy ") . Being left in very reduced circumstances, 

 her case was mentioned to King George III. and Queen Charlotte, 

 who not only invited her to reside near them at Windsor, but allowed 

 her a pension of £300 a year. She was skilful in painting, em- 

 broidery, and shell-work, but what she was most remarkable for was 

 an invention called " Paper Mosaic,'' a mode of imitating the forms 

 and colours of plants and flowers by means of variously-tinted papers. 

 The description of the process is too long to be given now.^ There 

 is a good deal about this lady in the Memoirs of the Granville 



* See Britton's Beauties of Wilts, vol. iii., p. 320. 



