The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV | Page 3

greatly. He placed them at the house of an old, out-of-fashion aunt,
who had been a keen partizan of the royal cause during the civil wars;
she was full of the heroic stiffness of her own times, and would read
books of Chivalry, and Romances with her spectacles.
This sort of conversation, much infected the mind of our poetess, and

fill'd her imagination with lovers, heroes, and princes; made her think
herself in an inchanted region, and that all the men who approached her
were knights errant. In a few years the old aunt died, and left the two
young ladies without any controul; which as soon as their cousin Mr.
Manley heard, he hasted into the country, to visit them; appeared in
deep mourning, as he said for the death of his wife; upon which the
young ladies congratulated him, as they knew his wife was a woman of
a most turbulent temper, and ill fitted to render the conjugal life
tolerable.
This gentleman, who had seen a great deal of the world, and was
acquainted with all the artifices of seducing, lost no time in making
love to his cousin, who was no otherwise pleased with it, than as it
answered something to the character she had found in those books,
which had poisoned and deluded her dawning reason. Soon after these
protestations of love were made, the young lady fell into a fever, which
was like to prove fatal to her life.
The lover and her sister never quitted the chamber for sixteen nights,
nor took any other repose than throwing themselves alternately upon a
little pallet in the same room. Having in her nature a great deal of
gratitude, and a very tender sense of benefits; she promised upon her
recovery to marry her guardian, which as soon as her health was
sufficiently restored, she performed in the presence of a maid servant,
her sister, and a gentleman who had married a relation. In a word, she
was married, possessed, and ruin'd.
The husband of our poetess brought her to London, fixed her in a
remote quarter of it, forbad her to stir out of doors, or to receive the
visits of her sister, or any other relations, friends, or acquaintance. This
usage, she thought exceeding barbarous, and it grieved her the more
excessively, since she married him only because she imagined he loved
and doated on her to distraction; for as his person was but ordinary, and
his age disproportioned, being twenty-years older than she, it could not
be imagined that she was in love with him.--She was very uneasy at
being kept a prisoner; but her husband's fondness and jealousy was
made the pretence. She always loved reading, to which she was now

more than ever obliged, as so much time lay upon her hands: Soon after
she proved with child, and so perpetually ill, that she implored her
husband to let her enjoy the company of her sister and friends. When he
could have no relief from her importunity (being assured that in seeing
her relations, she must discover his barbarous deceit) he thought it was
best to be himself the relator of his villany; he fell upon his knees
before her, with so much seeming confusion, distress and anguish, that
she was at a loss to know what could mould his stubborn heart to such
contrition. At last, with a thousand well counterfeited tears, and sighs,
he stabb'd her with the wounding relation of his wife's being still alive;
and with a hypocrite's pangs conjured her to have some mercy on a lost
man as he was, in an obstinate, inveterate passion, that had no
alternative but death, or possession.
He urged, that could he have supported the pain of living without her,
he never would have made himself so great a villain; but when the
absolute question was, whether he should destroy himself, or betray her,
self-love had turned the ballance, though not without that anguish to his
soul, which had poisoned all his delights, and planted daggers to stab
his peace. That he had a thousand times started in his sleep with guilty
apprehensions; the form of her honoured father perpetually haunting his
troubled dreams, reproaching him as a traitor to that trust which in his
departing moments he had reposed in him; representing to his tortured
imagination the care he took of his education, more like a father than an
uncle, with which he had rewarded him by effecting the perdition of his
favourite daughter, who was the lovely image of his benefactor.
With this artful contrition he endeavoured to sooth his injured wife: But
what soothing could heal the wounds she had received? Horror!
amazement! sense of honour lost! the world's opinion! ten thousand
distresses crowded her distracted imagination, and