mind of Grant. Historic, traditional, and poetical associations can light up their localities with brightness all their own. Heroes and heroines appear to advantage with a background of solemn or beautiful scenery, and the secondary charm of human interest is added by fictitious narrative to many an alpine spot. That charm, however, can invest any landscape, whether mountainous or marine, of the woodland or the plain: Cowper has difl'used it over the flat arable and pasture lands of Buckinghamshire; the Brontés have cast its lustre with fascinating brilliancy across the bleak and unpicturesque moors of Haworth. Genuine appreciation of natural scenery has its proper gradations of admiration and love for every landscape, but it is in all its varied characters essentially different and distinct from mere adventitious associations. Grant became reconciled to mountain heights, glens, and cataracts, for the sake of those who had trodden and sung there; or under the spell of romantic fiction. She learned to like the severe and stately glory of desert ranges; but it was after the same manner that some persons take pleasure in sea-views, on account of the graceful ships and pretty boats which diversify the monotonous vastness of the ocean. Discrepancies Having lived among the most eminent literary people of the time, and read all the fashionable books, Grant has thrown into her letters anecdotes, sketches of character, and critical remarks, which add to the interest they possess as records of family biography. Between her fragmentary Autobiography and the statements made in her Letters posthumously published, compared with her Letters from the Mountains, and her Memoirs of an American Lady, many flagrant discrepancies occur. Guided by the rule of always adopting contemporaneous documents in preference to long unwritten reminiscences, while accepting also such subsequent documents as cast a broader light upon preceding ones, this biographical notice has been founded upon the best evidence afforded by her writings. Her memory was wonderfully good, but she trusted it too implicitly upon other points as well as upon those of her family and personal history. The Letters from the Mountains, and the Memoirs of an American Lady, give totally different accounts of Aunt Schuyler’s birth and parentage. Several passages in the Memoirs are likewise opposed to each other. At page 141 of the Memoirs, Grant states that the old Colonel did not live to witness his eldest son’s marriage with Catalina, which took place in