The next letter, likewise docketed by Miss Jenkyns, was endorsed, “Letter of pious congratulation and exhortation from my venerable grandfather to my beloved mother, on occasion of my own birth.  Also some practical remarks on the desirability of keeping warm the extremities of infants, from my excellent grandmother.”

The first part was, indeed, a severe and forcible picture of the responsibilities of mothers, and a warning against the evils that were in the world, and lying in ghastly wait for the little baby of two days old.  His wife did not write, said the old gentleman, because he had forbidden it, she being indisposed with a sprained ankle, which (he said) quite incapacitated her from holding a pen.  However, at the foot of the page was a small “T.O.,” and on turning it over, sure enough, there was a letter to “my dear, dearest Molly,” begging her, when she left her room, whatever she did, to go up stairs before going down:  and telling her to wrap her baby’s feet up in flannel, and keep it warm by the fire, although it was summer, for babies were so tender.

It was pretty to see from the letters, which were evidently exchanged with some frequency between the young mother and the grandmother, how the girlish vanity was being weeded out of her heart by love for her baby.  The white “Paduasoy” figured again in the letters, with almost as much vigour as before.  In one, it was being made into a christening cloak for the baby.  It decked it when it went with its parents to spend a day or two at Arley Hall.  It added to its charms, when it was “the prettiest little baby that ever was seen.  Dear mother, I wish you could see her!  Without any pershality, I do think she will grow up a regular bewty!” I thought of Miss Jenkyns, grey, withered, and wrinkled, and I wondered if her mother had known her in the courts of heaven:  and then I knew that she had, and that they stood there in angelic guise.

There was a great gap before any of the rector’s letters appeared.  And then his wife had changed her mode of her endorsement.  It was no longer from, “My dearest John;” it was from “My Honoured Husband.”  The letters were written on occasion of the publication of the same sermon which was represented in the picture.  The preaching before “My Lord Judge,” and the “publishing by request,” was evidently the culminating point—­the event of his life.  It had been necessary for him to go up to London to superintend it through the press.  Many friends had to be called upon and consulted before he could decide on any printer fit for so onerous a task; and at length it was arranged that J. and J. Rivingtons were to have the honourable responsibility.  The worthy rector seemed to be strung up by the occasion to a high literary pitch, for he could hardly write a letter to his wife without cropping out into Latin.  I remember the end of one of his letters ran thus:  “I shall ever hold the virtuous qualities of my Molly in remembrance,