If I give myself till to-night, I may hesitate again. I'm weary of the torture of hesitating. I must and will have relief in the present, cost what it may in the future. My letter to Midwinter will drive me mad if I see it staring and staring at me in my desk any longer. I can post it in ten minutes' time-and I will! "It is done. The first of the three steps that lead me to the end, is a step taken. My mind is quieter-the letter is in the post. "By to-morrow Midwinter will receive it. Before the end of the week, Armadale must be publicly seen to leave Thorpe-Ambrose; and I must be publicly seen to leave with him. "Have I looked at the consequences of my marriage to Midwinter? No! Do I know how to meet the obstacle of my husband, when the time comes which transforms me from the living Armadale's wife, to the dead Armadale's widow? "No! When the time comes, I must meet the obstacle as I best may. I am going blindfold then-so far as Midwinter is concerned-into this frightful risk? Yes; blindfold. Am I out of my senses? Very likely. Or am I a little too fond of him to look the thing in the face? I daresay. Who cares ? "I won't, I won't, I won't think of it! Haven't I a will of my own? And can't I think, if I like, of something else? "Here is Mother Jezebel's cringing letter. else to think of. I'll answer it. I am in a fine to Mother Jezebel. That is something humour for writing Conclusion of Miss Gwilt's Letter to Mrs. Oldershaw. I told you, when I broke off, that I would wait before I finished this, and ask my Diary if I could safely tell you what I have now got it in my mind to do. Well, I have asked; and my Diary says, 'Don't tell her!' Under these circumstances, I close my letter-with my best excuses for leaving you in the dark. "I shall probably be in London before long-and I may tell you by word of mouth what I don't think it safe to write here. Mind, I make no promise! It all depends on how I feel towards you at the time. I don't doubt your discretion-but (under certain circumstances) I am not so sure of your courage. "L. G." "P.S.-My best thanks for your permission to renew the bill. I decline profiting by the proposal. The money will be ready, when the money is due. I have a friend now in London who will pay it, if I ask him. Do you wonder who the friend is? You will wonder at one or two other things, Mrs. Oldershaw, before many weeks more are over your head and mine." The Family of Temple. "THERE is a certain productiveness," says Aristotle, "in the families of men, as in the things that grow in the fields; and, sometimes, if the family be good, extraordinary men are for a certain time produced." Other high authority might be quoted in support of this observation, which is not without its value to historians and biographers. But the truth is that genealogy has suffered at the hands of genealogists. Partly by their ignorance of the higher applications of which it is capable,— partly by the falsities with which they have played into the hands of the fashionable reporter and the fashionable novelist,-they have lowered the credit of a study at once of much historical importance, and of much picturesque interest. Every now and then, however, some event occurs calling attention to the truths with which it is the proper business of genealogy to deal; and the recent death of Lord Palmerston had this, besides so many other points, of higher and more mournful significance. When everything else was being recorded of him, it was also recorded that he was the last male of his family,-a family of very ancient descent, and of high and long-continued intellectual distinction. The fact in itself touched the imagination of a people so keenly alive to the charm of tradition as the English. But those who from an old interest in such questions had become aware how essentially Palmerston was a child of his house-a Temple of the Temples,-naturally felt the weight of the fact more vividly to them, his death was the fall of an old tree, of an old tower, a tree that would give no more fruit, a tower that would no more shelter human and intellectual life. Let us place ourselves for a little in the position of one of these moralising inquirers; and see from what kind of stock the late Premier came, and how far its history justifies the old belief that every family, like every plant, has a life of its own, and a likeness running through all its leaves and flowers. Thanks in great measure to the kind of genealogists whom we have indicated in the sentence above, most family histories begin with a fable. The ancients made Plato descend from Neptune, Cæsar from Venus, and Antony from Hercules, just as our own early chronicles derive Alfred from Woden. In modern times our inventions are on a humbler scale, but are equally destitute of historical truth. We fasten on to the Norman baronage, families that rose by the Reformation; and descendants of provincial aldermen, whose names betray a suspicious connection with the old sport of bull-baiting, occasionally hold themselves up as representatives of the medieval chivalry. The Hamiltons are not content to have helped to put Bruce on the throne, they must needs be sprung from the Bellomont Earls of Leicester. The Cavendishes are dissatisfied with Wolsey's gentleman-usher, and lay claim to be scions of the higher race of Gernon. It has been the fortune of the Temples to find themselves associated with one of the prettiest legends of the middle ages, which has formed the subject of one of the prettiest poems of our own time. They have been given out as coming from the stout old Earl Leofric, of the Confessor's time, and his lady Godgifa or Godiva, who saved Coventry from a harsh impost by riding through the market-place clad only in her beautiful long hair. Leofric (who died in a. D. 1057) and his spouse are, of course, as really historical personages as the Confessor and Edith. And though the Godiva legend does not occur in the Saxon Chronicle, in William of Malmesbury, or in Florence of Worcester, it is found in Brompton, who flourished in 1193,* less than a century and a half after the date of its heroine. Nor have we a right to doubt the truth of any story simply because there is a noble and daring poetry about it. But as regards the descent of the Temples from Leofrie and Godiva, that is a comparatively modern statement. Dugdale knew nothing of it, though he gives a full account of the earl's real successors and family in his Baronage, and much information about him, his wife, and their pious and generous doings, in his Warwickshire. An earlier writer, and more important for this special question than even Dugdalea writer whose Leicestershire is said to have suggested Dugdale's Warwickshire-knew no more of the fact than he. We speak of William Burton, the elder brother of the author of the Anatomy of Melancholy, to whose curious mind his own bore a strong family resemblance. Burton was a Leicestershire squire himself, and in speaking of the lands of "Temple" in Sparkenhoe hundred, near Bosworth, from which the whole family of Temple derived its name, this is what he tells us :-"This land was granted by one of the old earls of Leicester to the Knights Templars. This land was afterwards granted by the Templars to a family of the place called Temple, being of great account in those parts." (Burton's Leicestershire, p. 264). Burton, then, knew nothing of the Saxon origin of the family; and it is certain that in the famous Sir William Temple's time they looked upon themselves as having "come in with the Conquest." It is often loosely assumed that a family must be either Norman or Saxon, though Burgundians and Flemings, Angevins and Poitevins, are found among the settlers in England in the stormy and adventurous ages during which the foundations of its modern life were laid. To which of the various races struggling for place and power the founder of the Temples belonged cannot now be known. The earliest names in the pedigree, Robert, William, and Henry, are those of Norman dukes and sovereigns,-an indication which has sometimes been allowed to have suggestive value in such cases. At all events we are safe in assuming that the man to whom * Wendover, in the next century, adds a slight picturesque touch to Brompton's narrative. Her hair, he says, concealed her, all but her very white legs-apparentibus cruribus candidissimis. the Templars gave land, would have the qualities which the Order of the Temple held in honour; and that he acquired his estate as his descendant acquired the premiership, by being superior to other rivals in the battle of life. Dismissing, then, the descent from Leofric as fabulous and modern, and trusting to old writers and official pedigrees, we shall be content to derive the Temples from Robertus Temple de Temple Hall, living in the reign of Henry III.-a date to which only something like a tenth part of the peerage can be satisfactorily traced. Robertus de Temple was succeeded by William, and by Henry flourishing in the reign of Edward I., whose marriage with Matilda, daughter of John Ribbesford, is the first that we find upon record. The five generations which followed allied themselves with Langley, Barwell, Dubernon, Bracebridge, and Kingscott, and the family ranked among the oldest and most considerable of the Leicestershire gentry. By siding, however, with Richard III., they lost most of their estate. Soon after the Reformation what was left came into the possession of some other Temples from Staffordshire, carrying different coat-armour.† And, at last, they, too, sold both the lands and the hall, and though some prosperous cadets of the house-such as the celebrated Sir William and his father-were anxious to recover it, they never could. We must now turn our attention to those cadets, for it was among them that appeared the eminent men to whom the name owes its modern celebrity. During the reign of Henry VI., a younger son of Temple of Temple Hall, named Thomas, settled himself at Witney in Oxfordshire. In three generations his descendants had acquired land in Warwickshire, and in the sixteenth century his representative acquired Stowe in Buckinghamshire. This was Peter Temple of Marston-Boteler in Warwickshire and Stowe in Bucks, whose eldest son, John, was the ancestor of the Temples of Stowe, and his second, Anthony, of the Viscounts Palmerston. John lies buried at Derset, in Warwickshire, with the following quaint epitaph, testifying to his general felicity and opulence :-- Cur liberos hic plurimos, The son of this prosperous gentleman was Sir Thomas Temple, of Stowe, the first baronet. The second and third baronets both sat for the town of Buckingham in the parliaments of the Charleses. The fourth-Sir Richard-fought under Marlborough, and was created Baron Cobham in 1714, and, in 1718, Viscount Cobham, with remainder to his sister, * Visitation of Leicestershire: Harl. MS. 1180. † Burton. He chose this title, as having a descent from the old Lords Cobham of Kent, first summoned to Parliament in A.D. 1313. Hester, wife of Richard Grenville of Wooton. This is the Cobham of And you, brave Cobham, to the latest breath, Oh, save my country, Heaven! shall be your last. Lord Cobham died without issue in 1749, when his barony and viscounty devolved on his sister, Hester Grenville, mother of the first Earl Temple, ancestress of the Dukes of Buckingham, and, what is of much more moral interest, grandmother of William Pitt. If, again to quote Aristotle, “the having had many illustrious persons in the family" is a necessary mark of nobility, then this is an honour in which the Temples excel houses of much higher pretension. While the Temple tree planted in Stowe was thus flourishing like a green bay-tree, the branch sprung from Anthony, younger son of Peter Temple, first of Stowe, had acquired a less splendid position but a more brilliant name. Anthony's son William, bred at Eton and Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, became, in the first half of Elizabeth's reign, master of the free school at Lincoln. A Latin essay on a philosophical subject which he dedicated, in 1581, to Sir Philip Sydney, won the admiration of that last rose of the summer of chivalry, who took Temple into his employment as a secretary, and into his intimacy as a friend. Sir Philip died in his arms at Arnheim, and dying commended him to the Earl of Essex, besides leaving him by will an annuity of thirty pounds. The friend of Sydney became the friend of Devereux, and having lost one patron on the field lost another on the scaffold. After the death of Essex, Temple went to seek his fortunes in Ireland. He became Provost of Dublin College, which he represented in the Irish Parliament in 1613. He was afterwards a Master in Chancery, and a knight, and he died at an advanced age in 1625. From this Sir William Temple, the first of the family connected with Ireland, the late Lord Palmerston was sixth in descent. As a Roman would have said, he was the Premier's tritavus,—a word which we should have to render in English by great-great-great-great-grandfather! By his wife, a Derbyshire woman, William left a son who became Sir John Temple, and who sustained the intellectual reputation which the family had begun to acquire. He was educated under his father at Dublin. He travelled in his youth. He had access to the court of Charles the First, and to the greatest personages of the time, and he continued the family friendship with the Sydneys. Sir Philip's nephew, Robert Sydney, was now second Earl of Leicester, "a man of great parts," says Lord Clarendon, "very conversant in books, and much addicted to the mathematics." In the Sydney Papers we find the countess writing to her husband (A.D. 1636) of "Sir John Temple, who is inquisitive in all affairs, and much your servant." There were tender associations between Temple and the earl's family. Sir John had married Esther Hammond, a sister of Dr. Hammond the celebrated divine. The doctor held the living of Penshurst, and at |