whom she was never reconciled.  Her quarrels with her granddaughter Lady Anne Egerton, afterwards Duchess of Bedford, were violent and incessant.  She lived in perpetual altercation with her youngest daughter, the Duchess of Montague.  She never was beloved by any of her children at any time, since they were in childhood and youth intrusted to the care of servants and teachers, while the mother was absorbed in political cabals at court.  She consulted their interest merely in making for them grand alliances, to gratify her family pride.  Her whole life was absorbed in pride and ambition.  Nor did the mortification of a dishonored old age improve her temper.  She sought neither the consolation of religion nor the intellectual stimulus of history and philosophy.  To the last she was as worldly as she was morose.  To the last she was a dissatisfied politician.  She reviled the Whig administration of Walpole as fiercely as she did the Tory administration of Oxford.  She haughtily refused the Order of the Bath for her grandson the Duke of Marlborough, which Walpole offered, contented with nothing less than the Garter.  “Madam,” replied Walpole, “they who take the Bath will sooner have the Garter.”  In her old age her ruling passion was hatred of Walpole.  “I think,” she wrote, “’tis thought wrong to wish anybody dead, but I hope ’tis none to wish he may be hanged.”  Her wishes were partly gratified, for she lived long enough to see this great statesman—­so long supreme—­driven to the very threshold of the Tower.  For his son Horace she had equal dislike, and he returned her hatred with malignant satire.  “Old Marlborough is dying,” said the wit; “but who can tell?  Last year she had lain a great while ill, without speaking, and her physician told her that she must be blistered, or she would die.  She cried out, ’I won’t be blistered, and I won’t die,’”

She did indeed last some time longer; but with increasing infirmities, her amusements and pleasures became yearly more circumscribed.  In former years she had sometimes occupied her mind with the purchase of land; for she was shrewd, and rarely made a bad bargain.  Even at the age of eighty she went to the city to bid in person for the estate of Lord Yarmouth.  But as her darkened day approached its melancholy close, she amused herself by dictating in bed her “Vindication,” After spending thus six hours daily with her secretary, she had recourse to her chamber organ, the eight tunes of which she thought much better to hear than going to the Italian opera.  Even society, in which she once shone,—­for her intellect was bright and her person beautiful,—­at last wearied her and gave her no pleasure.  Like many lonely, discontented women, she became attached to animals; she petted three dogs, in which she saw virtues that neither men nor women possessed.  In her disquiet she often changed her residence.  She went from Marlborough House to Windsor Lodge, and from Windsor Lodge to Wimbledon, only to discover that each place