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The early letters of -maria J osepha holroyd were considered by her contemporaries to be of unusual merit and worthy of careful preservation. Her acquaintance with many of the actors in the stirring scenes amid which her youth was spent furnished her with subjects of more than passing interest. 'were you to keep a journal,' Gibbon writes to her, of all the authentic facts which the French exiles relate, it would be an agree able exercise at present, and a future source of interest and instruction.' What Gibbon thought too of her style the following extracts from his letters to her father, Lord Sheffield, show I must have from the very excel lent pen of the Maria the tragedy of the Archbishop of Arles, and the longer the better; and again, 'the five incomparable letters of Maria.'
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