raven; but it is well known that a certain dashing
solicitor's clerk then living in the neighbourhood of Chelsea, and near
her amiable mamma's residence, first engrossed, her attention, and
by whom she exhibited increasing symptoms of affection, which being
properly engrafted on the person of the fair stockinger, in due time
required a release from a practitioner of another profession; an
innocent affair that now lies buried deep in an odd corner at the old
churchyard at Chelsea, without a monumental stone or epitaph to point
out the early virtues of the fair Cytherean. To this limb of the law
succeeded the Honourable Be--1--y C------n, who was then too volatile
and capricious to pay his devotions at any particular shrine for more
than a week together. It was this cold neglect of the honourable's that
has, perhaps, secured him from mention in her Memoirs; since Harriette
never speaks of her beaux without giving the reader to suppose they were
desperately in love with herself: then there was more of the dignified
in an affair with an earl, and Madame Harriette has a great notion of
preserving her consequence, although, it must be confessed, she has
latterly shown the most perfect indifference to the preservation of
character. The the cyprian's ball ~49~~circumstance which first gave
Miss Wilson her great notoriety was the affair with the young Marquis
of Worcester, then just _come out_, and a willing captive to her
artful wiles. So successfully did she inveigle her noble swain, and
so completely environ his heart, that in the fulness of his boyish
adoration of the fair Cytherean, he executed in her favour a certain
promise in writing, not a promise to pay, for that might have been of
no consequence, nor a promise of settlement, nor a promise to protect,
nothing so unsettled,--nothing less did the fair intriguante obtain
than a full, clear, and definite promise of marriage, with a sufficient
penalty thereunto attached to make the matter alarming and complete,
with every appearance on his part to ratify the contract. In this state
of things, information reached his Grace of B--f--t of his noble heir's
intention, who not much relishing the intended honour, or perhaps
doubting the permanency of his son's passion (for to question the purity
of the lady was impossible), entered into a negotiation with Harriette,
by which, on condition of her resigning the promise and pledging herself
never to see the Marquis more on familiar ter