SACHARISSA.*

"SACHARISSA," according to Dr. Johnson, is a name "derived from sugar, and implies a spiritless mildness and dull good- nature." A new indignity has been added by the modern use of the word saccharin, which is applied to a spurious sugar, allowed to invalids to whom the genuine thing is forbidden. Nothing could be more inappropriate than such a name to Dorothy Sidney as she is set before us in this admirable biography.

Dorothy (for whom, by-the-way, it would have been well to

construct a genealogical chart) came of a noble race, which reached its culminating point of distinction in Sir Philip Sidney. Robert, Philip's younger brother, was cr• ated suc- cessively Baron Sidney of Penshurst, Viscount De lisle, and Earl of Leicester by James I. He was succeeded in these dignities by his sole surviving son Robert; and Robert, marrying Dorothy Percy, elder daughter of the Earl of Northumberland, became the father of Dorothy Sidney. She was born in October, 1617, at Sion House, her grand- father Northumberland's mansion (the Earl himself was still in the Tower, where be had been shut up since the Gun- powder Plot). Her childhood and youth were spent at Pens- hurst, which had been the home of the Sidney family since 1551 This noble house still stands, little changed in itself,— less changed in its surroundings, its woods, its heronry, its fish- ponds, fruitful orchards, and stately gardens. There could not have been a happier or a more beautiful home, and the young maiden was equally fortunate in her family sur- roan din gs. Her father was scarcely decided enough for the part which he was called to play in public life, though it is possible that his vacillations saved his fortunes ; but in private he was all that is admirable. Her mother, though she was hasty in temper—witness her pathetic self-reproach and confession on - her death-bed—was devoted to her husband and children. Dorothy, the eldest of the family, was soon known as a beauty,– fair-haired, with a complexion of " roses and lilies," and the radiant eyes of which Vandyke's art has preserved such a likeness as colour could give. Her first suitor was Edmund Waller. To him she owes not only the only dubious compli- ment of her poetical name, but probably nine-tenths of • her fame. For all her noble birth, her beauty, her virtue, and her- ability, she would have been almost forgotten but for the poet who bade her take warning by the fate of the rose, or declared, as he looked at her girdle,—

"Give me but what this riband bound,

Take all the rest the sun goes round."

Dorothy did not appreciate her tuneful suitor. He was a widower, he was not her equal in birth, though he came of a good stock, and she discerned, we may well believe, that he was not a genuine man. That his passion was sincere, we need not doubt, though his method of expressing it was sometimes artificial to a high degree. But Sacharissa was not an ideal like Petrarch's Laura or Sarrey's Geraldine. She was a real maiden who moved his love, and, we may add, his ambition. But his suit was hopeless from the beginning. The girl, as has been said, disliked him, and her parents had other views for her. They have much to say about possible husbands, but, as Miss Cartwright remarks, Waller's name is never mentioned. The eligible suitor was, indeed, somewhat hard to find. Lord Russell, heir of the house of Bedford, was thought of ; the young Earl of Devonshire was all that was &charism : Some Ailment of Dorothy Sidney, Countess of Sunderland. her Family and Friends. Sy Julia tilartesight (Mrs. Henry Ady). London : Seeley and Ce. 1809.

desirable in manners and morals, though not very rich. But Lord Devonshire neverpresented himself. Another suitor, in the person of Lord Lovelace, was actually introduced at Leicester House, the Earl's town mansion. Unfortunately, he was given to drinking and to low company; Dorothy would have none of him, though some of her kinsfolk pressed his claims. The happy man was Henry, Lord Spencer, who had succeeded his father some two years before. This time there were no difficulties. He was, it is true, younger than Dorothy—he was in his twentieth year and she in her twenty-second—but his youth was his only fault. Unfortunately, we hear nothing about the wooing. The marriage took place on July 20th, 1639, at Penshurst. Her old suitor improved the occasion in a letter which pro- bably seemed perfect in its way to the taste of the time, and indeed, is exceedingly clever. Here is a part :-

" May she live to be very old, and yet seem young ; be told so by her glass, and have no aches to inform her of the truth ! And when she shall appear to be mortal, may her Lord not mourn for her, but go hand in hand with her to that place where we are told there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage ; that being there divorced, we may all have an equal interest in her again !"

This last wish was not to be fulfilled. Such divorce as death

can make came in far other fashion. After four years of happy married life—happy, so far as it was not marred by separation and fear—the young husband fell at Newbury. He was serving as a volunteer in the Royal ranks, and was mortally wounded as he was preparing to renew a charge which had been made three times with useless valour against the pikes of the Commonwealth soldiers. How the news was taken to Penshurst, and broken to the wife and mother, is told in a letter which, for its unstudied pathos, could not easily be matched.

For the next seven years, Lady Sunderland (her husband had been created Earl of Sunderland in the June before his death) lived at Penshurst in a suite of rooms still known as " Sacharissa's Rooms." She had her part in caring for the Royal children (the Duke of Gloucester and the Princess Elizabeth) who were committed, in 1649, to the charge of her father by the Parliament. The two were permitted to stay there for a little more than a year.

According to one account, the authorities were displeased at the respect paid to the children, who always had their meals at a separate table. Miss Wedgwood thinks that they were removed from fear of a Royalist rising. As the two elder sons were at large, the persons of these two younger children were not of much importance. Anyhow they were

removed in August, 1650, and committed to the care of Mr. Anthony Mildmay, Governor of Carisbrooke, with strict injunctions that they should be treated as the children of a private gentleman, and styled Mr. Harry and Lady Elizabeth." Just thirty days afterwards, the Princess, who had greatly improved in health at Penshurst, breathed her last. It is hardly possible to acquit the authorities of having shortened her life. In 14350, Lady Sunderland went to live at Althorp, her husband's house, and there, not a little to the surprise of the world, she married Sir Robert Smyth, of Boundes, in Kent.

Of him we know little more than that be was not unworthy of her ; how long her second marriage lasted we cannot say ;

but she was left a second time a widow. Meanwhile, we have

some lively notices of her from the pen of Dorothy Osborne ; of her own letters, unfortunately, little is left. There are three letters, composed with all the formality of the times, written before her marriage, and twenty-four letters which belong to the years 1679 and 1680, thirteen of them addressed to her brother, Harry Sidney, and the remainder to Lord Halifax (the husband of her daughter Dorothy). They are interesting in themselves, and because they prove the ability and the right feeling of the writer ; but they are not the letters, we may say, of Sacharissa. We cannot think of her, when we read them, as the girl whose beauty made both herself and her poetical lover immortal,—for who would remember Waller but for the

verses which she inspired P Her latter years were darkened by many sorrows ; the keenest, after her husband's death, was

that of her darling daughter, another Dorothy, Lord Halifax's first wife ; the last was the judicial murder of her brother

Algernon. On December 7th, Algernon Sidney died on Tower Hill. "Are you ready, Sir," asked the headsman; "will you rise again?" "Not till the general resurrection. Strike on!" was the patriot's reply. More's last jest must yield to this. His body was taken to Penehurst. Three months afterwards his sister "was buried in the chapel of the Spencers in

Brington Church, where the heart of the young Earl of Sunderland had been laid forty years before." Strangely enough, not even the names of this noble pair are recorded in their place of rest.

We have nothing but praise for the way in which Miss. Cartwright has done her work. If we have more of Dorothy Sidney's friends than of Dorothy Sidney herself, this is no fault of hers. She has done what she could, but fate has. dealt hardly with posterity in sparing so little when we:could scarcely have had too much.