promised to love, honour, and obey, (a vicious fool,) as in duty bound.

While they resided in London, they lived in the usual fashionable style,
and seldom saw each other; nor were they much more sociable when they
wooed rural felicity for more than half the year, in a delightful
country, where Nature, with lavish hand, had scattered beauties around;
for the master, with brute, unconscious gaze, passed them by unobserved,
and sought amusement in country sports. He hunted in the morning, and
after eating an immoderate dinner, generally fell asleep: this
seasonable rest enabled him to digest the cumbrous load; he would then
visit some of his pretty tenants; and when he compared their ruddy glow
of health with his wife's countenance, which even rouge could not
enliven, it is not necessary to say which a _gourmand_ would give the
preference to. Their vulgar dance of spirits were infinitely more
agreeable to his fancy than her sickly, die-away languor. Her voice was
but the shadow of a sound, and she had, to complete her delicacy, so
relaxed her nerves, that she became a mere nothing.

Many such noughts are there in the female world! yet she had a good
opinion of her own merit,--truly, she said long prayers,--and sometimes
read her Week's Preparation: she dreaded that horrid place vulgarly
called _hell_, the regions below; but whether her's was a mounting
spirit, I cannot pretend to determine; or what sort of a planet would
have been proper for her, when she left her _material_ part in this
world, let metaphysicians settle; I have nothing to say to her unclothed
spirit.

As she was sometimes obliged to be alone, or only with her French
waiting-maid, she sent to the metropolis for all the new publications,
and while she was dressing her hair, and she could turn her eyes from