ried all the appearance of it,
even supposing him base enough to have connived at the purchase. And in
such a case, Halifax would have taken care to respect the secrecy which he
would have known to have been essential to Newton's comfort: he would not
have published to the world that his mistress was Newton's niece, and that
Newton was a party to a settlement upon her. There seems to me, about the
codicil as it stands, a declaration that the connexion with Newton's niece
was such as, if people knew all, Newton might have sanctioned. And the
supposition of a private marriage, generally understood among the friends
of the parties, seems to me to make all the circumstances take an air of
likelihood which no other hypothesis will give them: and this is all my
conclusion.

If there were a marriage, the most probable reason for the concealment was,
that it was contracted at a time when the birth and station of Mrs. Barton
would have rendered her production at court as the wife of Montague an
impediment to his career. He was raised to the peerage in 1700, and as the
connexion was of long standing in 1706, it may well be supposed that it
commenced at the time when (in his own opinion at least) his prospects of
such elevation might have been compromised by a decided misalliance. The
lower the tone of morals, the greater the ridicule which attaches to
unequal _marriages_. Montague, though of noble family, was the younger son
of a younger son, and not rich: it was common among the Tories to sneer at
him as a _parvenu_. He had made his first appearance in the great world as
the husband of a countess-dowager, and it may be that the _parvenu_ was
weak enough to shrink from producing, as his second wife, a woman of very
much lower rank, the granddaughter of a country clergyman, and the daughter
of a man of no pretension to station. That Mr. Macaulay has not underrated
the position of the country clergy, is known to all who have dipped into
the writings of the seventeenth century. It is not, however, necessary to
explain why the supposed marriage should have been private. As the world is
constituted, no rules of inference can be laid down in reference to the
irregular relations of the sexes.

With reference to the insinuation that Newton owed his official position
rather to his niece than to his ability, it can be completely shown that,
on the worst possible supposition, the office in the Mint could have had
nothing to do with Mrs. C.