A woman uniting to the attainments of learning the best qualities of her sex, Lucy, the exemplary daughter of Sir Allen Apsley, well known by the memoirs of her husband, which she wrote with all the devotion of affection, is a character that cannot fail to excite interest.

She has given some account of herself in a few pages prefixed to the life of Colonel Hutchinson, the celebrated governor of Nottingham Castle, but the theme was soon abandoned by her for one more congenial, which, while it causes regret, at the same time creates admiration of her absence of egotism. She acquaints us that she was born on the 29th of January, 1619-20, in the Tower of London, of which her father was lieutenant: her mother, his third wife, was the daughter of Sir John St. John of Lidiard Tregoz, in Wilts.

“My father,” she says, “had then living a son and daughter by his former wives, and had afterwards three sons, I being my mother's eldest daughter. The land was then at peace, it being towards the latter end of the reign of King James, if that quietness may be called a peace which was rather like the calm and smooth surface of the sea before a horrid tempest.”