od's
daughter would have uttered or heard. When in waiting at Windsor or
Hampton, the Court ladies and gentlemen would be making riding parties
together; Mrs. Beatrix in a horseman's coat and hat, the foremost after
the stag-hounds and over the park fences, a crowd of young fellows at
her heels. If the English country ladies at this time were the most pure
and modest of any ladies in the world--the English town and court ladies
permitted themselves words and behavior that were neither modest nor
pure; and claimed, some of them, a freedom which those who love that
sex most would never wish to grant them. The gentlemen of my family that
follow after me (for I don't encourage the ladies to pursue any such
studies), may read in the works of Mr. Congreve, and Dr. Swift and
others, what was the conversation and what the habits of our time.

The most beautiful woman in England in 1712, when Esmond returned to
this country, a lady of high birth, and though of no fortune to be sure,
with a thousand fascinations of wit and manners, Beatrix Esmond was
now six-and-twenty years old, and Beatrix Esmond still. Of her hundred
adorers she had not chosen one for a husband; and those who had asked
had been jilted by her; and more still had left her. A succession of
near ten years' crops of beauties had come up since her time, and had
been reaped by proper HUSBANDmen, if we may make an agricultural simile,
and had been housed comfortably long ago. Her own contemporaries were
sober mothers by this time; girls with not a tithe of her charms, or
her wit, having made good matches, and now claiming precedence over
the spinster who but lately had derided and outshone them. The young
beauties were beginning to look down on Beatrix as an old maid, and
sneer, and call her one of Charles II.'s ladies, and ask whether her
portrait was not in the Hampton Court Gallery? But still she reigned,
at least in one man's opinion, superior over all the little misses
that were the toasts of the young lads; and in Esmond's eyes was ever
perfectly lovely and young.

Who knows how many were nearly made happy by possessing her, or, rather,
how many were fortunate in escaping this siren? 'Tis a marvel to think
that her mother was the purest and simplest woman in the whole world,
and that this girl should have been born from her. I am inclined to
fancy, my mistress, who never said a harsh word to her children (and
but twice or thrice only to one person), must have b