e
Royal household, I had frequent opportunities afforded me of improving
my acquaintance with Theresa; whose gentle and interesting manners more
than completed the conquest which her beauty had begun. Helen, I had
visited many foreign courts, and had been familiarized with the reigning
beauties of our own, at that time eminently distinguished by the
brilliancy of female beauty, but never in any station of life did
I behold a being so lovely in the expressive sadness of her fine
countenance, so graceful in every movement of her person. But this was
not all. Theresa possessed beyond other women that retiring modesty
of demeanour, that unsullied purity of look and speech, which made her
sufficiently remarkable in the midst of a licentious court, and among
companions whose levity at least equalled their loveliness. On making
more particular inquiries respecting her family connexions, I found that
they were strictly respectable, but of the middle class of life; and
that she had passed the period intervening between the death of her
father, General Marchmont, and her appointment at court, in the family
of an aged relative in the county of Devon, by whom indeed she had been
principally educated. It was at the dying instigation of this, her last
surviving friend and protector, that her destitute situation had been
represented to the king by the Lady Wriothesly, to whose good offices
she was indebted for her present honourable station. Being however, as
it were, friendless as well as dowerless, and backed in my suit by the
powerful assistance of the king's approbation, I did not anticipate much
opposition to my pretensions to the hand of Miss Marchmont, which
had now become the object of my dearest ambition. I knew myself to be
naturally formed for domestic life; and while the disastrous position
of public affairs had obliged me to waste the days of my early youth
in camps or courts, and in exile from my own hereditary possessions,
I resolved to pass the evening of my life in the repose of a happy and
well-ordered home in my native country.

"To the vitiated taste of the gallants of the court, many of whom might
have proved powerful rivals, had they been so inclined, marriage had
no attractions. The acknowledged distaste of Charles for a matrimonial
life, and his avowed infidelities, sanctioned the disdain of his
dissolute companions for all the more holy and endearing ties of
existence. I had therefore little to fear from compe