The Press.
London, England, 1858-09-11 00:00:00

OBITUARY.

LADY ISABEL ANNE Desnwoon, only surviving
daughter of James, seventh Earl of Lauderdale,
great grandfather of the present peer, died on Satur•
day last at her residence in Seamore-place. Her
ladyship married, Ist July, 1793. Mr. Francis
Dashwood, of Hall-place, Bexley, Kent. Several
families of rank, including Mr. and Lady Mary
Stanley, Lady Eleanor Balfour, the Hon. Sir
Anthony Maitland, etc., are placed in mourning.
Mn. JAMES M'GREGOR, the late Chairman of the
South Eastern Railway Company, expired at an early
hour on Sunday morning, under painfully sudden
circumstances. On Friday afternoon he called at
Mr. Douglas's, the hairdresser in New Bond-street,
for the purpose of having his hair cut. He inquired
if the assistant who usually attended on him was
disengaged, when, the words having scarcely escaped
his lips, be fell in the shop, and, on being raised,
was found unconscious of what was passing. The
case was one of paralysis. The unfortunate gentle-
man remained in the same lamentable state at Mr.
Douglas's until he died. He was returned for
Sandwich in 1852, on Conservative principles. Mr.
M'Gregor was born in 1808, and was twice married.
THOMAS BONSOR CROMPTON, ESQ., of Farnworth.
mills, near Manchester, died on Wednesday, in the
sixty-seventh year of his age, at the llasells, the
residence of T. Delarue, Esq., near Sandy, in Bed-
fordshire.

THE Loot or LONG LIFE is exemplified in the case
of the old Dowager Countess of Hardwicke, who died
the other day. Her life brought points of time
together which commonly seem separated by impass-
able spaces. She was born in 1763, and was, con-
sequently, only ninety-five years old; but her father,
the Scotch Earl of Balcarras, having been well
stricken in years at the time of her birth, their two
lives extended back to before the beginning of the
eighteenth century. It sounds strange that a
person just dead this summer could speak of he
father as having been " out in the Fifteen" (1715)
with Lord Derwentwater and Forster, and having
been begged off by the great Duke of Marlborough !
And yet such was the fact. And not only so, but
her grandfather, having been born in 1649, the three
lives of grandfather, son, and granddaughter,
stretched over a period of 209 years. And when her
grandmother was married, Charles 11. gave away the
bride ! This venerable lady had some good company
in her own time. Pitt, the younger, was four years
old when she was born ; Fox, a young pickle of
fourteen ; Sheridan, a not particularly clever lad of
twelve, so that they were strictly her contemporaries ;
Burke was turned of thirty, but the most brilliant
part of his public life was passed after she was old
enough to ramember him; she was twenty-one years
old when Dr. Johnson died, and a well-grown girl
when Goldsmith was inconsiderate enough to do the
same thing, and she might have known them both,
though it is not likely she did ; Sir Joshua may have
painted her, and probably did, as she was near thirty
when he died. Of course, all the literature of this
century, running back to the birth of Scott and
Wordsworth, eight or nine years after her own, was
as much hers as ours. She was married and six and
twenty before the French Revolution began, and the
whole of our own Revolution must have been within
her personal recollection. Then there was Vis-
countess Keith, who died within two or three years,
at about the same age, who was " the plaything often,
when a child," of Johnson, and who received his last
blessing on his deathbed. She was the daughter of
Mrs. Thrale, and was a link that directly connected
us with the Literary Club at its foundation, all the
members of which she must have seen, and most of
who:n she was old enough to know well as a grown-
up young lady. Lady Louisa Stuart, the daughter
of the famous Earl of Bute, actually remembered
her grandmother, Lady Mary Wortley Montague,
who died in 1702. She died herself since 1850, and
was the intimate friend of Scott, end one of the few
original depositaries of the Waverley secret. And
Miss Berry, who might have been the Dowager
Countess of Orford, as the widow of Horace. Walpole,
it' she had so pleased, died within a year or two.
But none of them had such luck as befell the
Marquis Di Mauso, who lived long enough to be the
personal friend of Tasso and of ".‘ltiton, though the
tir,t died more than ten years before the other was
born.