This nobleman, the Elder Brother in Comus, succeeding his father in 1649, when he was about twenty-seven years of age, became known as the 2d Earl of Bridgewater. Through the period of the Commonwealth and the Protectorate he appears to have lived on quietly, much as his father had done, amid books and literary relaxations, in the family town-house in Barbican or the country-seat at Ashridge. That he was, all the while, a Royalist and a hater of the Revolutionary Government is proved, among other evidences, by one which ought to be interesting to us here. There had come down in his possession, with other books of his father's, the MS. of that original stage-copy of Comus which had probably been made by Lawes for the use of the family at the performance at Ludlow in 1634. This MS. was probably valued by the Earl, and, with Lawes's printed edition of 1637, dedicated to himself, may have been looked at occasionally by him with recollections of his boyish part in the masque. At all events, it bears, in his hand, at the bottom of the title-page, the words “Author Jo. Milton." But at least one other and later writing of Milton's came into the Earl's hands, which excited very different feelings, and may even have reflected disgust on the innocent masque itself. This was a copy of Milton's Defensio pro Populo Anglicano contra Salmasium, or First Defence of the Regicide and Commonwealth Government, published in 1651. "Liber igne, Author furcâ, dignissimi” ("Book most worthy of the fire, Author of the gallows") are the emphatic words which the Earl wrote on the title-page of his copy of that work, and which are yet to be seen there, I believe, in his own hand. The strength of the Earl's Royalism, of which this is an instance, may have been partly owing to his marriage with the daughter of the splendid Royalist, and exile for Royalism, the Marquis of Newcastle. Between the Earl and his Countess, at all events, there was an attachment singularly strong and constant, which is yet one of the traditions of the family of the Egertons. At length, with the Restoration, days of greater publicity and prosperity dawned on the Earl and his wife, as on other Royalist houses. He entered on public life in the Court and Parliament of Charles II., and was chosen, in May 1663, High Steward of the University of Oxford. In that year, however, there befell him the greatest calamity of his life. His Countess died in childbirth, June 14, at the age of thirty-seven, leaving papers of pious meditations on the Bible, which are yet preserved, and six children, surviving out of nine whom she had borne in all.

With these children, styled, on her tombstone, "the living pictures of their deceased mother, and the only remaining comforts of their disconsolate father," the Earl lived on for three-and-twenty years longer, filling various public offices, besides that of Privy Councillor, under Charles II. and James II., and acting some part in the House of Lords. He died in 1686, and was buried, beside his wife, at little Gaddesden; where, by his own desire, this was the memorial on his monument: "Having, in the 19th year of his age, married the Lady "Elizabeth Cavendish, daughter to the then Earl, since Marquis, and "after that Duke, of Newcastle, he did enjoy, almost 22 years, all "the happiness that a man could receive in the sweet society of the "best of wives, till it pleased God, in the 41st year of his age, to "change his great felicity into as great misery, by depriving him of "his truly loving and entirely beloved wife, who was all his worldly "bliss; after which time, humbly submitting to, and waiting on, the "will and pleasure of the Almighty, he did sorrowfully wear out 23 "years, 4 months, and 12 days, and then, on the 16th of October, in "the year of our Lord 1686, and in the 64th year of his own age, "yielded up his soul unto the merciful hand of God who gave it. "Job xiii. 15: Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him." Collins, from whose Peerage (edit. 1779) this and the other sepulchral records of the family are taken, adds the following account of the Earl, given by Sir Henry Chauncey, who knew him well, in his History of the County of Hertford: "He was a person of middling stature, some"what corpulent, with black hair, a round visage, a modest and grave "aspect, a sweet and pleasant countenance, and a comely presence. “He was a learned man, delighted much in his library, and allowed "free access to all who had any concerns with him. His piety, "devotion in all acts of religion, and firmness to the Established "Church of England, were very exemplary; and he had all other "accomplishments of virtue and goodness." He was succeeded by his eldest son, John, as 3d Earl of Bridgewater.1

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1 The Earldom of Bridgewater, after having been held by this John, the 3d Earl, till 1701, came to his son, Scroop, as 4th Earl; who, in 1720, was created Duke of Bridgewater and Marquis of Brackley. On his death in 1745, the Dukedom descended to his son, John; who was succeeded, in 1748, by his brother, Francis, the Duke of Bridgewater so celebrated for his enterprise in canals and his patronage of Brindley. On his death, without issue, in 1803, the Dukedom became extinct; but the Earldom was continued in another branch of the Egerton family, descended from the fifth son of the 3d Earl. This branch

(3) The Lady Alice.-The beauty of the young girl who acted the part of the lost Lady in the masque is sufficiently implied in the masque itself; but her exquisite singing is most dwelt on. Thus, of her Echo-song in the enchanted wood, as it is supposed to affect the listening Thyrsis :

"At last a soft and solemn-breathing sound

Rose like a steam of rich distilled perfumes,

And stole upon the air, that even Silence

Was took ere she was ware, and wished she might

Deny her nature, and be never more,

Still to be so displaced. I was all ear,

And took in strains that might create a soul
Under the ribs of Death."

More than one portrait of this sweet Lady Alice Egerton are yet in existence. One, which I remember looking at again and again in the National Portrait Exhibition of 1866,-numbered 753 in that collection, represented her as a young girl, in a white dress and blue scarf, very pretty, and with very fair, almost lint-white, hair. She remained unmarried later than any of her sisters, residing with her father, in his house in the Barbican or at Ashridge, while he lived, and witnessing, as we have seen, while still in her youth, the early marriage of her brother Lord Brackley, and the death of her younger brother. In or about 1653, four years after her father's death and the accession of her only surviving brother to the Earldom, and when she was about thirty-three years of age, she married a nobleman considerably older than herself. This was Richard Vaughan, 2d

also became extinct in the Rev. Francis Henry, the 8th Earl, who died in 1829, and is remembered as the eccentric founder of the Bridgewater Treatises. The name of Egerton was assumed, by royal warrant, in 1833, by Lord Francis Leveson Gower, youngest son of the 1st Duke of Sutherland, and already, by bequest from his relative, the last Duke of Bridgewater (whose sister, Lady Louisa Egerton, had been 1st Marchioness of Stafford and mother of the 1st Duke of Sutherland), possessor of much of the Bridgewater property; and in 1846 this Lord Francis Gower was raised to the peerage as Earl of Ellesmere and Viscount Brackley. The new line of Earls of Ellesmere thus created are the present representatives of the old Egerton family and inheritors of its memorials, including Bridgewater House and its library. Old Bridgewater House in the Barbican was burnt down in 1687; some time after which the family town-residence was transferred to Cleveland House, St. James's, with its name changed to Bridgewater House. On this site the present edifice of the name was built, in 1847-50, by the 1st Earl of Ellesmere.

Earl of Carbery in the Irish Peerage, and also, since 1643, Baron Vaughan of Emlyn in the English Peerage. He had been conspicuous for his Royalism in the Civil War, had been twice married before, and had thirteen children by these previous marriages. It was in 1653, shortly after this marriage of the Earl of Carbery to Lady Alice Egerton, that Lawes dedicated to her, in conjunction with her elder sister, Mary, Lady Herbert of Cherbury, his musical “Ayres and Dialogues" (see ante, p. 147); and there is evidence that these two ladies continued to show much kindness to Lawes. The Earl of Carbery himself was known as a patron of struggling merit. It was on his estate of the Golden Grove in Caermarthenshire that Jeremy Taylor had found shelter after the ruin of the Royalist cause in the Civil War, supporting himself by keeping a school; and here, during a residence of some years, that famous divine had written some of his works, including the manual of Devotions to which he gave the name The Golden Grove, and to which, when it was published in 1656, there was a frontispiece by Hollar representing the Earl of Carbery's house and the surrounding scenery (Wood's Ath., Bliss's Edition, III. 783-785). This residence of Jeremy Taylor's on the Earl of Carbery's Caermarthenshire estate was before the Earl's marriage with his third wife, the Lady Alice Egerton; but Taylor's continued intimacy with the family is attested by the dedication of many of his writings to the Earl after this third marriage. The Earl surviving the Restoration, and having his property chiefly in Wales, the reward to which he was entitled for his long-proved loyalty took the form of his appointment to the revived office of the Welsh Presidency, that office having been in abeyance since it had been held by his wife's father, the first Earl of Bridgewater. Thus, by a romantic chance, the Countess of Carbery re-entered Ludlow Castle, and graced once more, as mistress of the Castle, the very hall in which, twenty-six years before, in her early girlhood, she had acted and sung her part in Milton's Comus. But this is not all the surprise. If tradition is correct, the secretary of the Earl of Carbery in the beginning of his Welsh Presidency, and the acting steward of Ludlow Castle under him through 1661 and 1662, was Samuel Butler, an elderly man, of whom the world had heard nothing as yet, but who was soon to be known as the author of Hudibras. To this day, I believe, they point out at Ludlow a little room in the entrance-gateway to the Castle as the place where Butler is supposed to have written portions of his immortal

burlesque. When the First Part of Hudibras was published in 1663, and all London was laughing over it, can any rumour of this connexion of its author with Ludlow Castle and the Carbery family have reached the blind Milton in his obscure London suburb; and, if so, did it ever occur to him as odd that this new favourite of the Restoration should have been walking so recently, with his steward's wand in his hand, and perhaps with pieces of the forthcoming Hudibras in his pocket, through the very hall in which Comus had been performed, and in the company of the very lady who had been the star of that performance as the young Lady Alice Egerton? Of the fact of her reconnexion in her mature life with the scenes she could remember so well from those days of her girlhood there is other, and less fanciful, proof. "To the Right Honourable Alice, Countess of Carbery, on her enriching Wales with her presence" is the title of one of the pieces among those Poems of Mrs. Katherine Philips ("The Matchless Orinda" of her contemporary admirers) of which there was a surreptitious edition in 1664, though the legitimate edition did not come out till 1667. Even more interesting is the fact that, when a posthumous book of Lady Carbery's old music-teacher and Milton's friend, Henry Lawes, appeared in 1669, with the title Select Ayres and Dialogues to sing to the Theorbo-Lute or Bass-Viol, it was found to contain a song by her husband, Lord Carbery, which he had addressed to her some time after their marriage. There may be other traces of Lady Carbery in her later years; but these are enough. Her husband died in 1687;

the date of her own death I have not found.