dition of mind might be disappointing to a fervent lover, but it is a pretty attitude for the young soul, and one which charms the spectator. Mary Pierrepont looks a very different creature from Mary Wortley Montagu. She is standing on the brink of the transition when the following letters pass between her and her lover. The first which we shall quote refers apparently to his first proposal:

"Give me leave to say it (I know it sounds vain)," writes the spirited and sensible girl, with a mingling of indignation in her candour, "I know how to make a man of sense happy; but then that man must resolve to contri

You

bute something towards it himself. have so much esteem for you, I should be very sorry to hear that you were unhappy, but for the world I would not be the instrument of making you so; which, in the humour you are, is hardly to be avoided, if I am your wife. distrust me--I can neither be easy nor loved when I am distrusted. Nor do I believe your passion for me is what you pretend it at least I am sure, were I in love, I could not talk as you do. Few women would have wrote so plain as I have done, but to dissemble is among the things I never do. I take more pains to approve my conduct to myself than to the world, and would not have to accuse myself of a minute's deceit. I wish I loved you enough to devote myself to be for ever miserable for the pleasure of a day or two's happiness. I cannot resolve upon it. You must think otherwise of me, or not at all. I don't enjoin you to burn this letter-I know you will. 'Tis the first I ever wrote to one of your sex, and shall be the last. You may never expect another. I resolve against all correspondence of the kind-my resolutions are seldom made, and never broken-"

Notwithstanding this very determined conclusion, the same day, or perhaps the next morning, throws new lights on the lover's letter which had drawn from her this spirited reply; and, forgetting her resolve, Lady Mary puts pen to paper once more, to repeat and strengthen and enforce in a womanish way which has not yet gone out of fashion, the answer which she

had already given, and which was decisive enough.

"Reading over your letter as fast as ever I could," she recommences abruptly, "and answering it with the same ridiculous precipitation, I find one part of it escaped my sight and the other I mistook in several places. Your

letter is to tell me you should think yourself undone if you married me; but if I could be so tender as to confess I should break my heart if you did not, then you would consider whether you would or no; but yet you hoped you should not. I take this to be the right interpretation of

even your kindness can't destroy me of a sudden. I hope I am not in your power. I would give a good deal to be satisfied, &c.'

You would have me say that I am violently in love; that is, finding you think better of me than you desire, you would have me give you a just cause to contemn you. I doubt much whether there is a creature in the world humble enough to do that. I should not think you more unreasonable if you were in love with my face, and asked me to disfigure it to make you easy. I have heard of some nuns who made use of this expedient to secure their own happiness; but amongst all the Popish saints and martyrs I never read of one whose charity was sublime enough to make themselves deformed or ridiculous to restore their lovers to peace and quietness."

Perhaps the young man who received these letters was wise enough to see that the smart of wounded pride in them was too sharp to be compatible with absolute indifference; at least, he seems to have taken them as no decisive answer, and to have pursued his suit in a way which clearly points him out as the original type of many gentlemen who have since enlightened and entertained the world, from Mr Rochester and Felix Holt down to the detestable prigs of American fiction-gentlemen who carry on their wooing by a series of insults and lectures. Mary Pierrepont was not a meek heroine, but still she seems to have yielded in some degree to the tantalising power of this strange kind of wooing. She struggles, she resists, she breaks out into little appeals; she restates

can't find it out that you are going to be unhappy, ask your sister, who agrees with you in everything else, and she will convince you of your rashness in this. She knows you don't care for me, and that you will like me less and less every year, perhaps every day of your life. You may with a little care please another as well, and make him less timorous. It is possible I too may please some of those that have but little acquaintance; and if I should be preferred by a woman for being the first among her companions, it would give me as much pleasure as if I were the first man in the world. Think again, and prevent a misfortune from falling upon both of us."

This letter concludes with instructions how they are to meet in the house of Steele by aid of his wife. And so the duel goes on. It is like the scene in Molière, which he repeats in several of his comedies, between offended lovers. No doubt the great dramatist repeated it because the quarrel of the two, their fury, their eternal farewell, their stolen looks, their relenting, and the sudden leap into each other's grasp of their eager reluctant hands, was such a piece of pretty fooling as no audience could resist. And here, in real English flesh and blood, in laced coat and quilted petticoat, in peruke and powder, stand Doris and Dorimène, performing their charming interlude. By-and-by matters become more serious. The formal negotiations are broken off, and there is the other lover, who offers £500 a-year of pin-money and a house in town, and on whose behalf Lord Dorchester lays out £400 in wedding-clothes. Things come to such a pitch at last that there is nothing for it but "a coach to be at the door early Monday morning," and an entire surrender into the hands of the honourable if aggravating bridegroom. "I tremble for what we are doing," the girl writes, in a fright, on the evening of the Friday before this momentous day.

that will happen. I shall incense my family in the highest degree. The generality of the world will blame my conduct, and the relations and friends of will invent a thousand stories of me; yet 'tis possible you may recompense everything to me. In this letter, which I am fond of, you promise me all I wish. Since I writ so far I received your Friday letter. I will be only yours, and Ï will do what you please."

And accordingly "early Monday morning" they ran away.

It is the pleasant privilege of fiction to end here. In such a case where could there be found a more charming, graceful story? People who had spoken their minds so freely to each other before their marriage, whose love had been tried by so many frets, and one of whom at last concluded the matter in such beautiful dispositions, what could they do but live happy ever after? "I will be only yours, and I will do what you please." What prettier ending could close the youthful tender tale? Alas! the story of this Lady Mary did not end with these words, but only began.

There is something humbling and disappointing in dropping down to the calm level of ordinary life, after that moment of exalted sentiment and idealism. The happiest and the least pretentious marriage shares this revulsion with the most showy and the most unfortunate. After that strain of passionate feeling, that sense of new life beginning, those noble resolutions and beautiful dreams, to wake and find after all that the obstinate earth is still the same, that the still more obstinate self is unchanged, and that life falls back into its accustomed channel, taking incredibly little heed of that one alteration of circumstances which, before it was made, seemed so radical and overwhelming, is hard upon any susceptible imagination. Neither bride nor bridegroom in the case be

fore us seem to have entertained any high-flown expectations; but yet it is not very long before Lady Mary begins to feel that a careless husband is a much less piquant and amusing interlocutor than a disapproving lover. It is evident that she spent a great part of the first few years of her married life alone. She writes to the errant husband, at first with pleasant expressions of her happiness in being his, but afterwards with alternations of petulance and melancholy and repentance for both. "I assist every day at public prayers in this family," she says in what it is evident is her first letter, a month or two after the marriage, when her heart is soft with unaccustomed happiness, and moved, in consequence, to a superficial religiousness, "and never forget in my private ejaculations how much I owe to heaven for making me yours." This blessed state of affairs, however, does not last very long. Within the first year a pensive sense of loneliness comes over the young wife; she does not complain, but she wonders at his absence and his silence; now and then she is sick and sad, and moralises: "Life itself, to make it supportable, should not be considered too nearly," she says. "It is a maxim with me to be young (the poor soul was three and twenty!) as long as one can; there is nothing can pay one for that invaluable ignorance which is the companion of youth; those sanguine groundless hopes, and that lively vanity which makes all the happiness of life. To my extreme mortification, I grow wiser every day." A little later she calls her fortitude to her, and is obstinately contented. "I discovered an old trunk of papers," she writes from the solitude of Hinchinbroke, "which to my great diversion I found to be the letters of the first Earl of Sandwich. . . . I walked yesterday two hours on the terrace these are the most considerable

events that have happened in your absence, excepting that a goodnatured robin - redbreast kept me company almost the whole afternoon with so much good-humour and humanity as gives me faith for the piece of charity ascribed to these little creatures in the 'Children in the Wood."" Some time after this she becomes indignant: "I am alone, without any amusement to take up my thoughts; I am in circumstances in which melancholy is apt to prevail even over all amusements, dispirited and alone, and you write me quarrelling letters. . . Should I tell you that I am uneasy, that I am out of humour and out of patience, should I see you half an hour the sooner ?——" and then the poor young creature is penitent, and excuses herself for complaining. The bright, beautiful, high-spirited young woman, removing from one doleful country house to another, estranged from all her natural friends, bearing all the physical ills natural in the circumstances, consuming her heart in enforced solitude, while the curmudgeon of a husband, the cause of all her troubles, amuses himself in the great world, and writes her, when he writes at all, quarrelling letters," are set forth before us with the greatest distinctness. Poor Lady Mary had, apparently, no high religious or any other kind of principle to support her. She was not a woman of the noblest kind, nor is her character a model one in any way yet her courage, and spirit, and patience; her eagerness to make the best of everything; the comfort she takes in the kind robin and the old letters; her endurance; her fancies; her occasional little outbursts, make up a picture at once pretty and affecting. Had she been less reasonable and more passionate, the story of what was evidently an unsuitable and uncomfortable marriage would no doubt have been more dramatic. But the age was one in which people were very composed in their

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affections; and she, it is apparent from first to last, was an eminently unimpassioned woman. But that she was chilled, wounded, mortified, lowered in her own estimation, and cut short in all possible blossoming of her affections, is clear enough. We wonder, if the story had been traced after marriage of all our modern heroes whose rôle it is to scold and find fault, like Mr Wortley, whether a similar result might not be perceptible? The consequence in this case to all readers will be a hearty pity and liking for Lady Mary, and a wholesome contempt for the narrow pedant whom, by bad luck, she had made the controller of her heart and fate.

Matters had come to such a pass between the two who, by a runaway marriage, had given what is generally supposed the strongest evidence of love, within two years after, that the young wife was moved to formal remonstrance.

"I cannot forbear any longer telling you," she writes, "I think you use me very unkindly. I don't say so much of your absence as I should do if you was in the country and I in London, because I would not have you believe that I am impatient to be in town when I say I am impatient to be with you; but I am very sensible I parted with you in July, and 'tis now the middle of November. As if this was not hardship enough, you do not tell me you are sorry for it. You write seldom, and with so much indifference as shows you hardly think of me at all. I complain of ill-health, and you only say you hope it is not so bad as I make it. You never inquire after your child.

You should consider solitude, and spleen the consequence of solitude, is apt to give the most melancholy ideas, and thus needs at least tender letters and kind expressions to hinder uneasiness almost inseparable from absence. I am very sensible how far I ought to be contented when your affairs oblige you to be without me. I would not have you do yourself any prejudice, but a little kindness will cost you nothing. ... I have concealed as long as I can the uneasiness the nothingness of your letters have given me under an affected indifference; but dissimulation always

sits awkwardly upon me. I am weary of it, and must beg of you to write me no more if you cannot bring yourself to write otherwise. Multiplicity of business or diversions may have engaged you, but all people find time to do what they have a mind to. If your inclination is gone, I had rather never receive a letter from you than one which in lieu of comfort for your absence gives me a pain even beyond it."

Notwithstanding all this, no sooner does the political horizon change, and an opening become visible for Wortley, if he can avail himself of it, in public life, than his wife springs eager to his side to encourage and stimulate him. And very strange to be uttered by a young woman of four-and-twenty, from the depths of rustic quiet, do these exhortations sound. The period is just after the accession of George I.—a new reign, a new era

when all the possibilities of power and influence lay before any new man who had force enough to seize them. Probably Lady Mary's faith in her husband's superiority had begun to fail, and, in consequence, she is great on the merits of boldness in opposition to modesty, which she evidently tries to persuade herself is all he wants to insure success.

Here is the open

ing note of the trumpet with which, in mingled flattery and menace, she attempts to stir him up :

"Though I am very impatient to see you, I would not have you, by hastening to come down, lose any part of your

interest.

I am glad you think of serving your friends. I hope it will put you in mind of serving yourself. I need not enlarge upon the advantages of money-everything we see and everything we hear puts us in remembrance of it. If it were possible to restore liberty to your country, or limit the encroachments of the prerogative, by reducing yourself to a garret, I should be pleased to share so glorious a poverty with you; but as the world is and will be, 'tis a sort of duty to be rich that it may be in one's power to do goodriches being another word for power, towards the obtaining of which the first necessary qualification is impudence, and (as Demosthenes said of pro