Lord Blessington was an Irish peer for whom an ancient title had
been revived. He was remotely descended from the Stuarts of
Scotland, and therefore had royal blood to boast of. He had been
well educated, and in many ways was a man of pleasing manner. On
the other hand, he had early inherited a very large property which
yielded him an income of about thirty thousand pounds a year. He
had estates in Ireland, and he owned nearly the whole of a
fashionable street in London, with the buildings erected on it.

This fortune and the absence of any one who could control him had
made him wilful and extravagant and had wrought in him a curious
love of personal display. Even as a child he would clamor to be
dressed in the most gorgeous uniforms; and when he got possession
of his property his love of display became almost a monomania. He
built a theater as an adjunct to his country house in Ireland and
imported players from London and elsewhere to act in it. He loved
to mingle with the mummers, to try on their various costumes, and
to parade up and down, now as an oriental prince and now as a
Roman emperor.

In London he hung about the green-rooms, and was a well-known
figure wherever actors or actresses were collected. Such was his
love of the stage that he sought to marry into the profession and
set his heart on a girl named Mary Campbell Browne, who was very
beautiful to look at, but who was not conspicuous either for her
mind or for her morals. When Lord Blessington proposed marriage to
her she was obliged to tell him that she already had one husband
still alive, but she was perfectly willing to live with him and
dispense with the marriage ceremony. So for several years she did
live with him and bore him two children.