viii The Duchess of Newcastle 



— Child of the Green-room, it was unkindly done of 

 thee." 



And in the essay on Mackery End, writing of Bridget 

 Elia, and speaking of her native disrelish for anything 

 odd or out of the common, Lamb says: " I can pardon 

 her blindness to the beautiful obliquities of the Religio 

 Medici; but she must apologise to me for certain dis- 

 respectful insinuations, which she has been pleased to 

 throw out latterly touching the intellectuals of a dear 

 favourite of mine, of the last century but one, — the 

 thrice noble, chaste and virtuous, — but again somewhat 

 fantastical and original - brained, generous Margaret 

 Newcastle." 



Again in the Last Essays of Elia his " Detached 

 Thoughts on Books and Reading " bring him back to 

 the Life. Certain kinds of books, he says, the perpetu- 

 ally self-reproductive volumes — we see them individually 

 perish with less regret, because we know the copies of 

 them to be eterne. But where a book is at once both 

 good and rare — ^where the individual is almost the 

 species, and when that perishes: 



We know not where is that Promethean torch 

 That can its light relumine — 



Such a book, for instance, as the Life of the Duke of 

 Newcastle, by his Duchess — no casket is rich enough, no 

 casing suf&ciently durable, to honour and keep safe such 

 a jewel." 



To turn from her book to the Duchess herself, — she 

 was the youngest daughter of a gentleman of estate, 

 Sir Thomas Lucas, who like her husband, though for a 

 different cause, spent some years in exile. He was of 

 a good Essex family — not quite as old in the roll as she 

 maintained, — with a country seat at St. John's, near 

 Colchester. The date of her birth may be fixed about 

 1625-6, to judge by sundry references in her own pages, 

 which tend always to the congenial topic of her own 

 feelings and affairs. For Margaret Newcastle is among 

 the self -confessors of literature, and she is never so happy 

 as when she is following her mood or writing about her 



