time as to present her with a ring, which she accepted at his hands; but it was not a plain gold one, and on the 14th of February his hopes were crushed by the return of the pledge of attachment.

And so it was: the widow all along, at all events from the preceding Christmas, had made up her own mind; but, like most rich and pretty widows, not at all in the direction of a life-long celibacy. She did not use the deepest of blackbordered note paper, or mount a long flowing white widow's cap on a rope of black silk, talk of herself as a 66 wreck," and of her life as a vie manquée, and carry on private flirtations in a dark room with charlatans and adventurers. But she kept her own counsel, and had her own way in the end; and having contrived to delude Sir Edward into an idea that the resumption of his place as a suitor was not absolutely a fruitless and hopeless task, one fine morning she surprised both him and the fashionable world, and everybody else except the worthy Recorder of London, by going quietly on the 16th of April, 1629after exactly twelve months of widowhood-to the Church of St. Clement Danes, where she was married, no doubt by special licence, to Sir Heneage Finch, with whom the affair no doubt had been pre-arranged ever since the previous

Christmas. It may interest our lady friends to learn that Sir Edward Dering took his defeat in good part, and soon set about retrieving his lost ground, time, and trouble by electing as his third wife he had already buried two-a daughter of Sir Ralph Gibbes, of Honington, Warwickshire, with whom, no doubt, he "lived happy ever afterwards."

Before we dismiss our notice of the pretty widow, it may be well to add that her son Simon -whom Sir Edward Dering treated with cakes in Finsbury Fields—became in the end a man of great wealth, which was carried by three daughters, his coheiresses, into several noble families, and that his uncle, Richard Bennett, or Bennet as the name is now spelt, was the ancestor of the Earls of Arlington and Tankerville. Of Mrs. Bennett's second mariage all that we know is bright and fortunate, except its brief continuance; and it is probable that among the many suitors, both bachelors and widowers, who sought her hand, she really chose the best, or one of the best. Of the issue of Sir Heneage Finch's first marriage, three sons and one daughter lived to grow up; and the eldest of these, named as his father, became Lord Chancellor of England and Earl of Nottingham, a title with which his descendants and representatives have joined the

Earldom of Winchelsea. By the pretty and wealthy widow, Sir Heneage had two daughters, Elizabeth, wife of Edward Maddison, Esq., and Anne, married to Edward, third Viscount and first Earl of Conway, ancestor of the present Marquis of Hertford. Sir Heneage Finch survived his marriage little more than two years, as he died on the 5th of December, 1631.

183

THE DUCAL HOUSE OF LEEDS.

UT of all the great families who have at

OUT

tained to the honour of a ducal coronet in England, most owe their existence either to the accident of being sprung from royalty by a left-hand marriage, or from successful statesmanship subsidised by a run of luck in the way of alliances with well-endowed heiresses. Some few dukedoms, I am aware-those of Wellington and Marlborough, for instance have been purchased by a series of brillant achievements in the field; one, and one only so far as I know -that of Norfolk-is sprung out of the successful career of an able lawyer; but there is one house, namely, that of the Osbornes, Dukes of Leeds, in whose early history is to be found an episode of city life so strange and so singular

that I need scarcely ask the pardon of my readers for introducing it to them here.

The romance to which I allude is nearly three centuries old, though it reads like an affair of yesterday. But before I come to tell it, I will beg my readers' patience while I sum up in a few words all that is known of the earlier history of the Osborne family. It is agreed among the heralds and the peerage makers that the Osbornes were of considerable antiquity in Kent long before they attained to the honours of the peerage, or even to a title at all. We are told that one John Osborne, esquire and landholder, was seated at Ashford in that county as far back as the reign of King Henry VI., when his name is returned in a list of the local gentry, as subscribing to the oath of allegiance. His lineal descendant, Richard Osborne, married a Kentish lady, Elizabeth Fylden or (more probably) Tylden; and his son, also Richard, marrying a Broughton of Westmorland, became the father of a certain Edward Osborne, who, entering early upon a commercial life, served as one of the Sheriffs of London and Middlesex in the seventeenth year of Elizabeth's reign, and eight years later was chosen in due course Lord Mayor of London. He received the honour of knighthood at Westminster in 1584, and not long afterwards was