This site's patron 'saint'

To prove there is nothing really new about blogging, I quote a passage about the woman who I feel I must adopt as the patron of this blog, Anne Clifford, a formidable Jacobean who outlived two husbands and ruled an aristocratic estate on her own for more than 30 years. It is reported that:

She would frequently bring out of the rich Store-house of her Memory, things old and new. Sentences, or Sayings of remark, which she had read or learned out of Authors and with these her Walls, her Bed, her Hangings and Furniture must be adorned; causing her Servants to write them in Papers, and her Maids to pin them up, that she, or they, in the time of their dressing, or as occasion served, might remember, and make their discants on them. So that, though she had not many Books in her Chamber, yet it was dressed up with the flowers of a Library.

She also commissioned a wonderful family portrait, now in the Tate Britain.

Quote from B. Kiefer Lewalski, Writing Women in Jacobean England, Hardvard Uni Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1993, p. 139.