CAVENDISH, MARGARET, DUCHESS OF NEWCASTLE. This eccentric lady, the youngest daughter of Sir Charles Lucas, was born in Esau towards the close of the reign of James I. In 1613 sho appointed a maid of honour to Henrietta Merle; and, accompanying the queen to Paris she became in 1615 the second wife of William Cavendish, who had formerly been Earl and was then Marquis of Newtaatle, and who had borne arms in the civil war with oourag,e and selfsicrotion. The exile of the Marchioness and her husband was chiefly spent at Antwerp, and was accompanied by frequent pecuniary embarrassments, which she had the spirit to avow in her memoir of her husband's life. Both of them were forced at one time to pawn even their clothes. A visit which she paid to England was unsuccessful In ring any grant out of the family estates; but assistance fur s,' by relatims enabled the Marquis and his wife to subsist more ceenfortatdy till the Restoration. On that event they returned to England ; and in 1661 the Marquis was created Duke of Newcastle. The remainder of their married life was spent In the retirement of the country. The Duchess died iu the end of the year 1673, and her hnshand, aged eighty-four, in 1676.
The period which the acquisition of the dukedom was chiefly devoted by the noble pair to that course of literary study and composition, which, however creditable in the motive, was rendered Ise whimsical by the eccentric character of tho parties. Horace Walpole, in his ' Royal and Noble Authors,' found a tempting theme for his W natnred wit in the picture of the duke and duchess, prosecuting their harmless occupations with an aristocrntio forgetfulness of the whole world besides, each regarding the other as the greatest genius of the times, and each lavishing on the other, in conversation and in print, the most extravagant hyperboles of commendation. The Duke had long before appeared more than once as an author; and particularly by the publication of his work on 'Horsemanship,' first printed in French at Antwerp in 1655, and afterwards in English, with altera tions, at London in 1667. In the later period of his life, tho example of his wife tempted him to perpetrate some comedies which were even worse than her own. She was indeed at once the more ambitious and by far the more industrious writer of the two. There was scarcely any department of composition, either in prose or in verse, on which she did not exercise her ready pen. Her singularly constituted mind
was &heap in fomentation; and, not content with recording its pro duct. at ordinary hours, site kept some of hor attendant Indies within all even during the night, to write down the bright thoughts that arose in boors of sleeplessness. The result of this distempered activity was a collection of ten printed folios, besides other works that never saw the light. Catalogues of these, and of the Duke's works', will be found In Walpole and in the lBlographia Britaouica.' The best known works of the Duchess are her two volumes of plays, published respect tardy In 1662 and 1609. These effusions deserve a passing inspeotiou from the stuslait of literary Maori, both as monuments of unredeemed anl eselfestisfied absurdity, and u examples of some principles in literary composition to which no author before or since has over been boll enough to avow obedient*. Not only for the higher laws of style, bet even for the ordinary rules of English grammar, "the thrice noble, Mutt-loos, aid excellent Princess" (as her title-pages all her) pro fessed a sovereign contempt. In several of those nine addresses "to the Readers" which, besides other prefaces, stand In succession before her first volume of plays, she magnanimously declares her willingness that bee writing* should be unread by "such pedantical seholaatical persons" as attach importance to grammatical distinctions of gender, and to those other laws of language, as to which she announces, that, If she understood thorn, as she dose not, she would not follow them.
Her prudes was quite conformable to this frank profession. It is rarely, for esample, that she condescends to join a plural verb with a plural nominative. Hut all such technical faults are as nothing, com pared with the childish and senseless eatravagancies which In those plays make up the whole tisane of the matter. There is not In one of them a emus that is dramatic do anything but the form. That they should be free from coarseness was not to be expected In snob an age; but mine of the most Indelicate scenes are carefully marked as having been written by "the Lord Marquee..." The philosophical discus sion. which &hound throughout are claimed by the lady as her own.