inheritance, he took care early to grow richer, by marrying Mrs.
Banks, a great heiress in the city, whom the interest of the court
was employed to obtain for Mr. Crofts. Having brought him a son,
who died young, and a daughter, who was afterwards married to Mr.
Dormer, of Oxfordshire, she died in childbed, and left him a widower
of about five-and-twenty, gay and wealthy, to please himself with
another marriage.

Being too young to resist beauty, and probably too vain to think
himself resistible, he fixed his heart, perhaps half-fondly and
half-ambitiously, upon the Lady Dorothea Sidney, eldest daughter of
the Earl of Leicester, whom he courted by all the poetry in which
Sacharissa is celebrated; the name is derived from the Latin
appellation of "sugar," and implies, if it means anything, a
spiritless mildness, and dull good-nature, such as excites rather
tenderness and esteem, and such as, though always treated with
kindness, is never honoured or admired.

Yet he describes Sacharissa as a sublime predominating beauty, of
lofty charms, and imperious influence, on whom he looks with
amazement rather than fondness, whose chains he wishes, though in
vain, to break, and whose presence is "wine" that "inflames to
madness."

His acquaintance with this high-born dame gave wit no opportunity of
boasting its influence; she was not to be subdued by the powers of
verse, but rejected his addresses, it is said, with disdain, and
drove him away to solace his disappointment with Amoret or Phillis.
She married in 1639 the Earl of Sunderland, who died at Newbury in
the king's cause; and, in her old age, meeting somewhere with