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8 nothing but those uncultivated, undisciplined manners and that vulgarity which make all Irish society so justly odious all over Europe. I must, however, make one illustrious exception to all that has been said within and without my family, in the person of Lady Arabella Denny, to whose virtues, talents, temper, taste, true religion, and goodness of every kind, it is impossible for me to do sufficient justice, any more than to the unspeakable gratitude I owe her. If it was not for her I should have scarce known how to read, write, or articulate, to being able to do which I am indebted, perhaps, for the greatest part of the little reputation I have lived to gain in the House of Lords. It was to her alone I owed any alleviation of the domestic brutality and ill-usage I daily experienced at home. She was the only example I had before me of the two qualities of mind which most adorn and dignify life—amiability and independence. She was married young to a neighbouring gentleman, one of the oldest family among the English-Irish, a very good sort of man, uninformed and ignorant, but who had a brother, Sir Denny, a coward, a savage, and a fool, who set himself to make her life unhappy. She knew that if she complained, or even told her husband, it would make an irreconcileable breach between the two brothers, and therefore she could not reconcile it to her principles. She told me however that, finding she could not endure his brutality, and that her nerves began to fail her, she had recourse to the following stratagem. She determined to learn privately to fire a pistol. When she had practised sufficiently to become a very good shot, she prevailed upon him, without letting him into the secret, to accompany her to the retired spot where she practised, and showed him how dexterous she had become, telling him at the same time that she suffered so much from his brutality, that if he did not alter his behaviour, she was determined to apply the skill she had obtained by coming behind him, or by the surest means she could invent, his ill-usage having made her regardless as to her own life. After this conversation he immediately changed his manner, and