Mary, the heroine of this fiction, was the daughter of Edward, who
married Eliza, a gentle, fashionable girl, with a kind of indolence
in her temper, which might be termed negative good-nature: her
virtues, indeed, were all of that stamp. She carefully attended to the
shews of things, and her opinions, I should have said prejudices,
were such as the generality approved of. She was educated with the
expectation of a large fortune, of course became a mere machine: the
homage of her attendants made a great part of her puerile amusements,
and she never imagined there were any relative duties for her to
fulfil: notions of her own consequence, by these means, were
interwoven in her mind, and the years of youth spent in acquiring a
few superficial accomplishments, without having any taste for them.
When she was first introduced into the polite circle, she danced with
an officer, whom she faintly wished to be united to; but her father
soon after recommending another in a more distinguished rank of life,
she readily submitted to his will, and promised to love, honour, and
obey, (a vicious fool,) as in duty bound.
While they resided in London, they lived in the usual fashionable
style, and seldom saw each other, nor were they much more sociable
when they wooed rural felicity for more than half the year, in a
delightful country, where Nature, with lavish hand, had scattered
beauties around; for the master, with brute, unconscious gaze, passed
them by unobserved, and sought amusement in country sports. He hunted
in the morning, and after eating an immoderate dinner, generally fell
asleep: this seasonable rest enabled him to digest the cumbrous load;
he would then visit some of his pretty tenants; and when he compared
their ruddy glow of health with his wife's countenance, which even
rouge could not enliven, it is not necessary to say which a gourmand
would give the preference to. Their vulgar dance of spirits were
infinitely more agreeable to his fancy than her sickly, die-away
languor. Her voice was but the shadow of a sound, and she had, to
complete her delicacy, so relaxed her nerves, that she became a mere
nothing.
Many such noughts are there in the female world! yet she had a good
opinion of her own merit,--truly, she said long prayers,--and
sometimes read her Week's Preparation: she dreaded that horrid place
vulgarly called hell, the regions below; but whether her's was a
mounting spirit, I cannot pretend to determine; or what sort of a
planet would have been proper for her, when she left her material
part in this world, let metaphysicians settle; I have nothing to say
to her unclothed spirit.
As she was sometimes obliged to be alone, or only with her French
waiting-maid, she sent to the metropolis for all the new
publications, and while she was dressing her hair, and she could turn
her eyes from the glass, she ran over those most delightful
substitutes for bodily dissipation, novels. I say bodily, or the
animal soul, for a rational one can find no employment in polite
circles. The glare of lights, the studied inelegancies of dress, and
the compliments offered up at the shrine of false beauty, are all
equally addressed to the senses.
When she could not any longer indulge the caprices of fancy one
way, she tried another. The Platonic Marriage, Eliza Warwick, and
some other interesting tales were perused with eagerness. Nothing
could be more natural than the developement of the passions, nor more
striking than the views of the human heart. What delicate struggles!
and uncommonly pretty turns of thought! The picture that was found on
a bramble-bush, the new sensitive plant, or tree, which caught the
swain by the upper-garment, and presented to his ravished eyes a
portrait.--Fatal image!--It planted a thorn in a till then
insensible heart, and sent a new kind of a knight-errant into the
world. But even this was nothing to the catastrophe, and the
circumstance on which it hung, the hornet settling on the sleeping
lover's face. What a heart-rending accident!
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