The Blessed Virgin—­blest she is
      That does not make her Heaven’s Queen! 
   Yet some are taught to worship her;
      What else does all this teaching mean?

What she denied to the Mother of God she accorded (rather daringly, I opine) to one Harriet, whose death and future are recorded in the following lines:—­

   Declining like the setting sun
   After a course divinely run,
   I saw a maiden passing fair
   Reposing on an easy chair.

   A Bridegroom of celestial mien
   Came forth and claimed her for His Queen;
   One with His Father on His throne
   She lives entirely His own.

Harrietolatry, I thought, was confined to the members of the defunct Shelley Society.  But every reader will feel the poignant truth of Mrs. Farrer’s view of the Church of England—­truer to-day than it could have been in the ’eighties:—­

   The Church of England—­grand old ship—­
      Toss’d is on a troubled sea! 
   Her sails are rent, her decks are foul’d,
      Mutiny on board must be.

   The winds of discord howl around,
      Wild disputers throw up foam,
   From high to low she’s beat about;
      Frighten’d some who love her roam.

I do not know if the last word is intended for a pun, but I scarcely think it is likely.

I would like to reconstruct Mrs. Farrer’s home, with its stiff Victorian chairs, its threaded antimacassars, its pictorial paper-weights, its wax flowers under glass shades, and the charming household porcelain from the Derby and Worcester furnaces.  There must have been a sabbatic air of comfort about the dining-room which was soothing.  I can see the engravings after Landseer:  ‘The Stag at Bay,’ ‘Dignity and Impudence’; or those after Martin:  ‘The Plains of Heaven,’ and ’The Great Day of His Wrath’; and ‘Blucher meeting Wellington,’ after Maclise.  I can see on each side of the mirror examples of the art of Daguerre, which have already begun to produce in us the same sentiment that we get from the early Tuscans; and on the mantelpiece a photograph of Harriet in a plush frame, the one touch of modernity in a room which was otherwise severely 1845.  Then, on a bookshelf which hung above the old tea-caddy and cut-glass sugar-bowl, Georgiana’s library—­’Line upon Line,’ ’Precept upon Precept,’ ‘Jane the Cottager,’ ‘Pinnock’s Scripture History,’ and a few costly works bound in the style of the Albert Memorial.  The drawing-room, just a trifle damp, must have contained Mr. Hunt’s ’Light of the World,’ which Mrs. Farrer never quite learned to love, though it was a present from a missionary, and rendered fire and artificial light unnecessary during the winter months.  Would that Mrs. Farrer’s home-life had come under the magic lens of Mr. Edmund Gosse, for it would now be classic, like the household of Sir Thomas More.

Whatever its attractions, Mrs. Farrer was at times induced to go abroad, visiting, I imagine, only the Protestant cantons of Switzerland.  She stayed, however, in Paris, which she apostrophises with Sibyllic candour:—­