founders, would be like the hanging out of false lights by wreckers. There should at least be permission to sell out and withdraw to England. But the respite was very short, and there came a series of tribulations. The nuns in Paris might have given us interesting accounts of their own experiences; but domiciliary visits rendered it unsafe to keep diaries, and only one convent out of three subsequently drew up a record of its sufferings. We know from the minutes of Jacobin commissaries that, unlike some of their French sisters, the English nuns unanimously declined to re-enter the world, and they felt the full force of the revolutionary hurricane. Their lives, indeed, were never in danger, except from a possible repetition of the September massacres, but they suffered great privations.
The Austin nuns, since 1634, had carried on a school, to which leading Catholic families, Pastons, Towneleys, Fermors,and Blounts, sent their daughters. Dr. Johnson and the Thrales called on them in 1775, when the sub-prior Frances Fermor, niece of Arabella, the heroine of the "Rape of the Lock," described Pope as a disagreeable man, the poem as rather an insult than an honour to the family, and her aunt as rendered troublesome and conceited by it. Mrs. Thrale (then Madame Piozzi) paid the nunnery a second visit in 1784, when she made in her diary some sarcastic comments on the easy, care-free lives of the inmates. The flippant lady
