respect he was not worse than nine men out of ten. But then he professed
to be better than nine hundred thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine men
out of a million! To a fault of temperament was added the craft of
hypocrisy, and the vulgar error became a dangerous vice. Upon Mary
Westbrook, the widow's daughter, he gazed with eyes that were far from
being the eyes of the spirit. Even at the age of fourteen she charmed
him; but when, after watching her ripening beauty expand, three years
were added to that age, Mr. Templeton was most deeply in love. Mary was
indeed lovely,--her disposition naturally good and gentle, but her
education worse than neglected. To the frivolities and meannesses of a
second-rate fashion, inculcated into her till her father's death, had now
succeeded the quackeries, the slavish subservience, the intolerant
bigotries, of a transcendental superstition. In a change so abrupt and
violent, the whole character of the poor girl was shaken; her principles
unsettled, vague, and unformed, and naturally of mediocre and even feeble
intellect, she clung to the first plank held out to her in "that wide sea
of wax" in which "she halted." Early taught to place the most implicit
faith in the dictates of Mr. Templeton, fastening her belief round him as
the vine winds its tendrils round the oak, yielding to his ascendency,
and pleased with his fostering and almost caressing manner, no confessor
in Papal Italy ever was more dangerous to village virtue than Richard
Templeton (who deemed himself the archetype of the only pure
Protestantism) to the morals and heart of Mary Westbrook.

Mrs. Westbrook, whose constitution had been prematurely broken by long
participation in the excesses of London dissipation and by the reverse of
fortune which still preyed upon a spirit it had rather soured than
humbled, died when Mary was eighteen. Templeton became the sole friend,
comforter, and supporter of the daughter.