or revenge; that she hardly knew the merit of forgiveness of injuries, because it cost her nothing; and that a harsh expression, a slanderous aspersion, any indication of hatred or of spite, never broke from her, even when the resources of ingenuity were exhausted in order to goad her feelings, and self-defence almost made anger and resentment a duty.

It will be said that the fair side is here presented of this remarkable picture,—remarkable if the original were found in a cottage, but in a palace little short of miraculous. If, however, there be so fair a side to the portraiture, shall it not turn away the wrath which other features may possibly raise on reversing the medal? But that is not the defence, nor even the palliation, which belongs to this unparalleled case. Was ever human being who had been so treated-above all, was ever woman who had been so treated as this woman had been-visited with severe censure if she at some time fell into the snares at all times laid for her undoing? Were ever faults, made next to unavoidable, by systematic persecution in all matters down to the most trifling from the most grave, regarded as inexpiable, or only to be expiated by utter destruction? It is one of the grossest and most unnatural of the outrages against all justice, to say nothing of charity, which despots and other slave-owners commit, that they visit on their hapless victims the failings which their oppressions burn as it were into the characterthat they affect disgust and reprobation at what is their own handiwork-and assume from the vices they have themselves engendered a new right to torment whom they have degraded. These men can never learn the lessons of inspired wisdom, and lay their account with reaping as they have sowed. Were a tyrant to assume some strange caprice, by grafting the thorn upon the vine-tree, or the vine-tree, or placing the young dove among vultures to be reared, surely it would surpass even the caprice of a tyrant, and his proverbial con

tempt of all reason beyond his own will, were he to complain that he could no longer gather grapes from the plant, and that the perverted nature of the dove thirsted for blood. Did any parent, unnatural enough to turn his child among gipsies, ever prove so senseless or unreasonable as to complain of the dishonest habits his offspring had acquired? By what title, then, shall a husband, who, after swearing upon the altar to love, protect, and cherish his wife, casts her away from him, and throws her into whatever society may beset her in a strange country, pretend to complain of incorrect demeanour, when it is no fault of his that there remains in the bosom of his victim one vestige of honesty, of purity, or of honour? It is not denied, it cannot be denied, that levities little suited to her station marked the conduct of the Princess; that unworthy associates sometimes found admittance to her presence; that in the hands of intriguing women she became a tool of their silly, senseless plots; that, surrounded by crafty politicians, she suffered her wrongs to be used as the means of gratifying a place-hunting ambition, which rather crawled than climbed; and that a character naturally only distinguished by mere heedless openness, and a frankness greater than common prudence seems to justify in those who dwell in palaces, became shaded, if not tarnished, by a disposition to join in unjustifiable contrivances for self-defence. But the heavy charges of guilt brought against her, in two several investigations, were triumphantly repelled, and by the universal assent of mankind, scattered in the wind, amidst their unanimous indignation; and from the blame of lesser faults and indiscretions into which she is admitted to have been betrayed, the least regard to the treatment she met with must, in the contemplation of all candid minds, altogether set her free.

No sooner was the marriage solemnized, which plunged the country into unmixed joy, and raised a mingled expectation and sneer among the population

of the court, than the illustrious husband proceeded to the most exemplary, and indeed scrupulous fulfilment of his vows-but not those made at the altar. There were others of a prior date, to which, with the most rigorous sense of justice, he therefore gave the preference; performing them with an exactness even beyond the strict letter of the engagement. It is true they were not quite consistent with the later obligations "to love, cherish, and protect;" but they were vows notwithstanding, and had been attested with many oaths, and fierce imprecations, and accompanied with a touching and a copious effusion of tears. Their purport was an engagement to reject, to hate, and to insult the wedded wife; to yield her rivals, not unwedded, but the helpmates of other lords, the preference on all occasions; to crown the existence of the one with all favour, and affection, and respect, while that of the other should be made wretched and unbearable by every slight which could be given, every outrage which could be offered to the feelings most tyrannical over the female bosom. Swift followed, then, upon the making of the second and public vow, the punctual fulfilment of the first and private obligation. Never did the new-married pair meet but in the presence of others; the Princess was treated on every occasion, but most on public occasions, with ostentatious neglect, nay, with studied contumely; each resource of ingenious spite was exhausted in devising varied means of exhibiting her position in melancholy contrast with the empire of her rivals: when she submitted, trampled upon as dastardly and mean; when she was reluctantly goaded into self-defence, run down and quelled and punished as contumacious; and as soon as mal-treatment was suspected to have begotten the desire of retaliation, she was surrounded with spies, that not a gesture or a look, a word or a sigh, might pass unregistered, unexaggerated, unperverted. Yet no one incident could be found upon which to hang the

slightest charge of impropriety. Witness the necessity to which the Whig friends of Carlton House were reduced (for want of other blame), of complaining that the sympathy of the people had been awaked in behalf of the persecuted and defenceless stranger; and that she did not shun occasions of seeing her only friend, the People, so carefully as the Whig notion of female propriety deemed fitting, or the Carlton House standard of conjugal delicacy required.

At the end of a tedious and sorrowful year, the birth of the Princess Charlotte once more intoxicated the nation with loyal joy, and made it forget as well the silent sorrows of the one parent, as the perfidious cruelty of the other. Scarce had the mother recovered, when a fresh and unheard-of outrage greeted her returning health. The "First Gentleman of his age" was pleased, under his own hand, to intimate that it suited his disposition no longer to maintain even the thin covering of decency which he had hitherto suffered to veil the terms of their union; he announced that they should now live apart; and added, with a refinement of delicacy suited to the finished accomplishments of his pre-eminence among gentlemen, that he pledged himself never to ask for a nearer connexion, even if their only child should die, he interjected, with a moving piety, "Which God forbid !"-in case it might be imagined that the death of the daughter was as much his hope as the destruction of the mother. The separation thus delicately effected made only an apparent change in the relative position of the parties. They had before occupied the same house, because they had lived under one roof, but in a state of complete separation; and now the only difference was, that, instead of making a partition of the dwelling, and assigning her one half of its interior, he was graciously pleased to make a new division of the same mansion, giving her the outside, and keeping the inside to his mistresses and himself.

*

The incessant vigilance with which the unhappy Princess's conduct was now watched, by eyes ready to minister fictions to those who employed them, soon produced a report that their prey had fallen into the appointed snare. It was duly represented to the "Most amiable Prince of his times," living with his paramours, that the wife whom he had discarded for their society, and to whom he had given what the head of the law, his comrade and adviser, scrupled not to term "a Letter of Licence," had followed his example, and used the licence; in short, that she had been secretly delivered of a child. No intrigue had been denounced as detected by the spies; nor could any person be fixed on as he who had committed high treason, by defiling the solitary bed to which the "Companion of the King's son"t had been condemned by her tender and faithful consort. The charge, however, was made, and it was minutely investigated,-not by the friends of the accused, but by the political and the personal associates of her husband. The result was her complete and triumphant acquittal of all but the charge that she had, to vary the monotony of her sequestered life, adopted the child of a sailmaker in the neighbourhood of her residence; thus endeavouring to obtain for her own daughter's society a substitute upon whom the natural instinct of maternal feeling might find a vent, to relieve an overburthened heart. It was little creditable, certainly, to the Commissioners who conducted this "Delicate Investigation," as it was termed, that they stooped to mention levities of conduct wholly immaterial, and confessedly quite inoffensive in her, while they cautiously abstained from pronouncing any censure upon the guilt of the other party, by whose faithlessness and cruelty her existence had been rendered a scene of misery.

In those days the accidental distributions of party

*Lord Thurlow.

† La Compagne Fitz le Roy-says the statute of Treasons.