this marriage the condition of his favour quite apparently, and that certain ruin would follow my rejection. The letter, perhaps, still exists in which I declared my resolution to adhere to the maxims of filial duty he had taught me, and refuse (when I should be asked) any offer, however tempting, that should seek to seduce me from his authority under which both myself and my mother were placed. By this time the brothers quarrelled and met no more. My father took us to London. My uncle solaced himself with visiting the widow; and after a miserable winter, which visits from Mr. Thrale—to my mother-rendered terrifying to me every day from papa's violence of temper, a note came, sent in a sly manner, from Dr. Collier, to tell me (it was written in Latin) that Sir Thomas would certainly marry Mrs. King the Sunday following, and begged I would not say a syllable till the next day, when he would come and break the dreadful tidings to my father.

My countenance, however, showed, or his acuteness discovered, something he did not like; an accusation followed, that I received clandestine letters from Mr. Thrale, a circumstance I had certainly every just reason to deny, and felt extremely hurt, of course, at seeing myself disbelieved. After a fruitless and painful contest for many hours of this cruel evening, my spirits sunk, I fainted, and my father, gaining possession of the fatal billet, had to ask my pardon-poor unhappy soul! and in this fond misery spent we the hours till four o'clock in the morning. At nine we rose; he to go across the park in search of my maternal uncle, Sir

Lynch Salusbury Cotton, from whom, and from Dr. Crane, Prebendary of Westminster, he meant to seek counsel and comfort. Me, to the employment of calling our medical friend, Herbert Lawrence, to dinner by a billet of earnest request. All of us were ill, but by the time he came, my father died, and was brought us home a corpse, before the dining hour. This was December 1762, fifty-three years ago exactly. Yet are not my feelings blunted!

The Will gave to my mother his Bachygraig House, and estate for life, charged with 5000l. for me; to which my uncle, in consideration perhaps of my poor father's having paid every expense of his education at Cambridge, perhaps in recollection of having lost him a farm of 100l. a year, added 5000l. more; with which (and expectations of course) Mr. Thrale deigned to accept my undesired hand, and in ten months from my poor father's death, were both the marriages he feared accomplished.

My uncle went himself with me to church, gave me away, dined with us at Streatham Park, returned to Hertfordshire, wedded the widow, and then scarce ever saw or wrote to either of us; leaving me to conciliate as I could, a husband who was indeed much kinder than I counted on, to a plain girl, who had not one attraction in his eyes, and on whom he never had thrown five minutes of his time away, in any interview unwitnessed by company, even till after our wedding-day was done!

My mother staid with us, however, so did her niece,

Miss Hester Salusbury Cotton, now Lady Corbet. Mr. Murphy was introduced, and the facetious Georgey Bodens, as the men called him. Lord Carhampton's father, Simon Luttrell, afterwards known to all the town by the emphatic title "King of Hell," * besides a very sickly old physician, who seemed as if living with us, Dr. Fitzpatrick, a Roman Catholic; the rest were professed Infidels.

When winter came, however, I was carried to my town residence, Deadman's Place, Southwark; which house, no more than that in Surrey, had been seen by me till called upon to inhabit it. Here, too, my mother quitted us, and lived at our old mansion in Dean Street, Soho, then no unfashionable part of the world, and thither I went-oh how willingly! to visit her every day. My husband's sisters † (who, like himself, were eminent for personal beauty) now called upon me, looked at me, and in modern phrase, seemed to quiz me, asking how I liked Dr. Fitzpatrick, their brother's Jesuit friend? I answered drily, that the Doctor was wellread and well-bred, apparently in extreme ill health (he was a physician), and that Mr. Thrale's friends must necessarily be mine. The ladies withdrew, disappointed, and I tried with all diligence to canvass the man whom they thought, and of course I thought, had

* It was told of him that he challenged his son, the Colonel Luttrell (afterwards Earl of Carhampton) of Middlesex election celebrity, who refused to fight him, "not because he was his father, but because he was not a gentleman."

† Mrs. Rice, Mrs. Nesbitt (afterwards Mrs. Scott), and Lady Lade.

so much influence; where if I gained none I must be-. come a nuisance. The doctor had no more influence than myself; but being so much about them all, could at least tell me les tracasseries de famille of which I was wholly ignorant. From him in due time I learned what had determined my husband's choice to me, till then a standing wonder. He had, the doctor said, asked several women, naming them, but all except me refused to live in the Borough, to which, and to his business, he observed, that Mr. Thrale was as unaccountably attached now as he had been in his father's time averse from both. And oh cried the old man, how would my deceased friend have delighted in this happy sight! alluding to my state of pregnancy.

So summer came again, and Streatham Park was improving, and autumn came, and Lady Keith came, and I became of a little more importance. Confidence was no word in our vocabulary, and I tormented myself to guess who possessed that of Mr. Thrale; not hist clerks certainly, who scarce dared approach him— much less come near me; whose place he said was either in the drawing-room or the bed-chamber. We kept, meantime, a famous pack of fox-hounds, at a hunting box near Croydon; but it was masculine for ladies to ride, &c. We kept the finest table possible at Streatham Park, but his wife was not to think of the kitchen. So I never knew what was for dinner till I saw it.

Driven thus on literature as my sole resource, no wonder if I loved my books and children. From a gay life my mother held me fast. Those pleasures Mr.

Thrale enjoyed alone; with me indeed they never would have suited; I was too often and too long confined. Although Doctor Johnson (now introduced among us) told me once, before her face, who deeply did resent it, that I lived like my husband's kept mistress, shut from the world, its pleasures, or its cares.

The scene was soon to change. Fox-hounds were sold, and a seat in Parliament was suggested by our new inmate as more suitable to his dignity, more desirable in every respect. I grew useful now, almost necessary; wrote the advertisements, looked to the treats, and people to whom I was till then unknown, admired how happy Mr. Thrale must be in such a wonder of a wife.

I wondered all the while where his heart lay; but it was found at last, too soon for joy, too late almost for sorrow. A vulgar fellow, by name Humphrey Jackson, had, as the clerks informed me, all in a breath, complete possession of it. He had long practised on poor Thrale's credulity, till, by mixing two cold liquors which produced heat perhaps, or two colourless liquors which produced brilliancy, he had at length prevailed on him to think he could produce beer too, without the beggarly elements of malt and hops. He had persuaded him to build a copper somewhere in East Smithfield, the very metal of which cost 2000l., wherein this Jackson was to make experiments and conjure some curious stuff, which should preserve ships' bottoms from the worm; gaining from Government money to defray these mad expenses. Twenty enormous vats, holding