they were
married, and they were both divorced afterwards--poor little souls! Poor
painted mother, poor society, ghastly in its pleasures, its loves, its
revelries!

As for my lord commissioner, we can afford to speak about him: because,
though he was a wild and weak commissioner at one time, though he hurt his
estate, though he gambled and lost ten thousand pounds at a sitting--"five
times more," says the unlucky gentleman, "than I ever lost before;" though
he swore he never would touch a card again; and yet, strange to say, went
back to the table and lost still more: yet he repented of his errors,
sobered down, and became a worthy peer and a good country gentleman, and
returned to the good wife and the good children whom he had always loved
with the best part of his heart. He had married at one-and-twenty. He
found himself, in the midst of a dissolute society, at the head of a great
fortune. Forced into luxury, and obliged to be a great lord and a great
idler, he yielded to some temptations, and paid for them a bitter penalty
of manly remorse; from some others he fled wisely, and ended by conquering
them nobly. But he always had the good wife and children in his mind, and
they saved him. "I am very glad you did not come to me the morning I left
London," he writes to G. Selwyn, as he is embarking for America. "I can
only say, I never knew till that moment of parting, what grief was." There
is no parting now, where they are. The faithful wife, the kind, generous
gentleman, have left a noble race behind them: an inheritor of his name
and titles, who is beloved as widely as he is known; a man most kind,
accomplished, gentle, friendly, and pure; and female descendants occupying
high stations and embellishing great names; some renowned for beauty, and
all for spotless lives, and pious matronly virtues.

Another of Selwyn's correspondents is the Earl of March, afterwards Duke
of Queensberry, whose life lasted into this century; and who certainly as
earl or duke, young man or greybeard, was not an ornament to any possible
society. The legends about old Q. are awful. In _Selwyn_, in _Wraxall_,
and contemporary chronicles, the observer of human nature may follow him,
drinking, gambling, intriguing to the end of his career; when the
wrinkled, palsied, toothless old Don Juan died, as wicked and unrepentant
as he had been at the hottest season of youth and passion. There is a
house in Piccadilly, where they used to show a certain