Judgments in Vacation

by Sir Edward Abbott Parry

DOROTHY OSBORNE.

Iachimo. Here are letters for you.

Posthumus. Their tenor good, I trust.

Iachimo. ’Tis very like.

Cymbeline ii. 4.

They had set (it is years ago now) the Period of the Restoration as subject for the Historical Essay Prize at Oxbridge. I had been advised to read Courtenay’s Life of Sir William Temple. It would give me an insight into the times, and a thorough knowledge of the Triple Alliance.

It was in my uncle’s library that I found the book—two octavo volumes of memoirs bound in plain green cloth, with mouldy yellow backs. I remember it well, and the circumstances surrounding it.

I threw open the windows, piled all the red cushions into one window seat, placed a chair for my feet, and took up the volumes. I cast my eyes over the contents of Vol. I.: a portrait of Temple—a handsome fellow—engraved by one Dean, after Sir Peter; a genealogical table. Ugh! And twenty chapters of negotiations to follow. My uncle was right, it was undoubtedly a dull book.

The second volume looked more interesting; there was something in it about Swift. Memory asserting herself, I remembered Temple to be Swift’s first patron, and Stella, I fancy, was Lady Temple’s maid. Happy Stella! At that moment a piece of paper fluttered out of the volume in my hand on to the floor, driving the Dean and his affairs out of my head. I picked it up. An old paper, brown at its edges and foldings, singed by time. On it were some verses—a sonnet. It ran thus:—

“TO DOROTHY OSBORNE,

“Why has no laureate, in golden song,

Wreathed rhythmic honours for her name alone,

Who worships now anear a purer throne?

And chosen, from that lovely, loyal throng

Of wantons ambling devilward along

At beck of God’s Anointed, one to praise,

Of brightest wit, yet pure through works and days,

Constant in love, in every virtue strong.

Dorothy, gift of God, it was not meant,

That thy bright light should shine upon the few,

Within the straitened circle of thy life;

Failing to reach mankind and represent

His own ideal, manifest in you,

Of holy woman and the perfect wife.”

I was a sonneteer myself, and therefore critical. This effort (was it my uncle’s?) did not seem to me of portentous genius. I hate your sonneteer who has more than two rhymes in his octett. It proves him a coward at the measure, one who is burdened by those shackles in which he should move as skilfully and lightly as a clever dancer bound to the knees on stilts. Those two subdominant rhymes were misplaced; so was the sudden stop in the sixth line, the violent cæsura in the sense, sending a cold shiver through the cultured mind. I did not admire the sestett either in its arrangement, but much liberty has always been allowed in the management of the sestett. For an amateur sonnet, I had read, nay, I will be just, I had written worse.

But whom does this sonnet describe? Dorothy Osborne, who is she? Lady Temple, answers Courtenay, and says little more. But she has written her own life, and painted her own character, as none else could have done it for her, in letters written to her husband before marriage. When I had read these, I pitied the unknown, and forbore to criticise his sonnet. I, too, could have written sonnets, roundels, ballads by the score to celebrate her praise. But I remembered Pope’s chill warning about those who “rush in where angels fear to tread,” and, full of humility I did not apply it to my friend the sonneteer, but—to myself.

These letters of Dorothy Osborne were, at one time, lying at Coddenham Vicarage, Suffolk. Forty-two of them has Courtenay transferred to an appendix, without arrangement or any form of editing, as he candidly confesses, but not without misgivings as to how they will be received by a people thirsting to read the details of the negotiations which took place in connection with the Triple Alliance. Poor Courtenay! Did he live to learn that the world had other things to do than pore over dull excerpts from inhuman state papers? For the lighting of fires, for the rag-bag, or, if of stout paper or parchment, for the due covering of preserves and pickles, much of these Temple correspondences and treaties would be eminently fitted, but for the making of books they are all but useless; book-making of such material is not to be achieved by Courtenay, nay, nor by the cunningest publisher’s devil in Grub Street. Here, beneath poor blind Courtenay’s eye, were papers and negotiations, not about a triple alliance between states, but concerning a dual alliance between souls. Here, even for the dull historian, were chat, gossip, the witty portrayal of neighbours, the customs, manners, thoughts, the very life itself, of English human beings of that time, set out by the living pen of Dorothy Osborne. Surely it was within his power at least to edit carefully for us those letters? Alas, no! All that he can do is to produce a book in two unreadable octavo volumes, and to set down in an appendix, not without misgivings but forty-two of these charming letters.

But I will dare to put it to the touch to gain or lose it all. I cannot, I know, make her glorious by my pen, but I can let her own pen have free play, and try to draw from her letters, and what other data there are at hand, some living presentment of a beautiful woman, pure in dissolute days, passing a quiet domestic existence among her own family; a loyalist, leading, in Cromwell’s days, a home-life of which those who draw their history from the pleasant pages of Sir Walter’s historical novels can have little idea. To confirmed novel readers it will be, I think, an awakening to learn that there was ever cessation of the “clashing of rapiers” and “heavy tramp of cavalry” in the middle of the seventeenth century.

Dorothy Osborne, born in 1627, was the daughter of Sir Peter Osborne, Lord Treasurer’s Remembrancer (an inherited office) and Governor of Guernsey in the days of James I. and Charles his son. She was the only daughter now (1650) unmarried, and had been named after her mother, Dorothy, without further addition. Much more could be collected of this sort from the lumber in Baronetages and Herald’s manuals; but to what purpose? William Temple was born in 1628.

It was in 1648, when the King was imprisoned at Carisbrook, in Colonel Hammond’s charge, that Dorothy first met her constant lover. They met in the Isle of Wight. She and her brother were on their way to St. Malo. Temple was starting on his travels. A little incident, almost a Waverley incident, took place here, worth reciting, perhaps. The Osbornes and Temple were loyalists. Young Osborne, more loyal than intelligent, remained behind at an inn where they had halted, that he might write on a window pane with a diamond “And Haman was hanged upon the gallows he had prepared for Mordecai.” This attack on Colonel Hammond, and the audacity of a cavalier daring to apply the Scriptures after the Puritanical method, caused the whole party to be arrested by the Roundheads, and a very pretty adventure was spoilt by the ready wit of our Dorothy taking the offence upon herself, when, through the gallantry of the Roundhead officer, the whole party was suffered to depart. “This incident,” says Courtenay, on good authority, “was not lost upon Temple.” Indeed, I think with Courtenay; but would add that much else besides was not lost upon him. Travelling with her and her brother, staying with her at St. Malo, is it to be wondered that Temple was attracted by the bright wit, clear faith and honesty of Dorothy; or that the brilliant parts and seriousness of Temple—a great contrast to many of the bibulous, rowdy cavaliers whom she must have met with—made her find in him one worthy of her friendship and her love? That Temple at this time openly declared his love I doubt. Love grew between them unknown to either. Years afterwards Dorothy writes:—

“For God’s sake, when we meet let us design one day to remember old stories in, to ask one another by what degrees our friendship grew to this height ’tis at. In earnest I am at a loss sometimes in thinking on’t; and though I can never repent of the share you have in my heart, I know not whether I gave it you willingly or not at first. No; to speak ingenuously, I think you got an interest there a good while before I thought you had any, and it grew so insensibly, and yet so fast, that all the traverses it has met with since, have served rather to discover it to me than at all to hinder it.”

The further circumstances necessary to the understanding of Dorothy’s letters, are shortly, these: Dorothy lived at Chicksands Priory, where her father was in ill-health, and there she received suitors at her parent’s commands. The Osbornes, it seemed, disliked Temple, and objected to him on the score of want of means; whilst Temple’s father had planned for his son an advantageous match in another quarter. Alas! for the frowardness of young couples! They held their course, and waited successfully.

Hardly can we do better that you may picture Dorothy and her mode of life clearly to yourself, than copy this important letter for you at length:

“You ask me how I pass my time here. I can give you a perfect account, not only of what I do for the present, but of what I am likely to do this seven years if I stay here so long. I rise in the morning reasonably early, and before I am ready I go round the house till I am weary of that, and then in the garden till it grows too hot for me. About ten o’clock I think of making me ready; and when that’s done I go into my father’s chamber; from thence to dinner, where my cousin Molle and I sit in great state in a room and at a table that would hold a great many more. After dinner we sit and talk till Mr. B. comes in question, and then I am gone. The heat of the day is spent in reading or working, and about six or seven o’clock I walk out into a common that lies hard by the house, where a great many young wenches keep sheep and cows, and sit in the shade singing of ballads; I go to them, and compare their voices and beauty to some ancient shepherdesses that I have read of, and find a vast difference there; but, trust me, I think these are as innocent as those could be. I talk to them, and find they want nothing to make them the happiest people in the world but the knowledge that they are so. Most commonly, while we are in the middle of our discourse, one looks about her, and spies her cows going into the corn, and then away they all run as if they had wings at their heels. I, that am not so nimble, stay behind, and when I see them driving home their cattle I think ’tis time for me to retire too. When I have supped I go into the garden, and so to the side of a small river that runs by it, where I sit down and wish you with me (you had best say this is not kind, neither). In earnest, ’tis a pleasant place, and would be more so to me if I had your company. I sit there sometimes till I am lost with thinking; and were it not for some cruel thought of the crossness of our fortune, that will not let me sleep there, I should forget there were such a thing to be done as going to bed.”

Truly a quiet country life, in a quiet country house; poor lonely Dorothy!

Chicksands Priory, Bedfordshire, is a low-built sacro-secular edifice, well fitted for its former service Its priestly denizens were turned out in Henry VIII’s monk-hunting reign (1538). To the joy or sorrow of the neighbourhood: who knows now? Granted then to one, Richard Snow, of whom the records are silent; by him sold, in Elizabeth’s reign, to Sir John Osborne, Knt. (Dorothy’s brother was first baronet); thus it becomes the ancestral home of our Dorothy. There is a crisp etching of the house in Fisher’s Collections of Bedfordshire. The very exterior of it is Catholic, unpuritanical, no methodism about the square windows set here and there, at undecided intervals, wheresoever they may be wanted. Six attic windows jut out from the low-tiled roof. At the corner of the house a high pinnacled buttress rising the full height of the wall; five buttresses flank the side wall, built so that they shade the lower windows from the morning sun, in one place reaching to the sill of an upper window. Perhaps Mrs. Dorothy’s window; how tempting to scale and see. What a spot for the happier realisation of Romeo and Juliet, or of Sigismonde and Guichard, if this were romance. In one end of the wall are two Gothic windows, claustral remnants, lighting now, perhaps, the dining-hall, where cousin Molle and Dorothy sat in state; or the saloon, where the latter received her servants. There are old cloisters attached to the house; at the other side of it may be. Yes! a sleepy country house, the warm earth and her shrubs creeping close up to the very sills of the lower windows, sending in morning fragrance, I doubt not, when Dorothy thrust back the lattice after breakfast. A quiet place, “slow” is the accurate modern epithet for it, “awfully slow.” But to Dorothy, a quite suitable home at which she never repines.

This etching of Thomas Fisher, of December 26th, 1816, is a godsend to me, hearing as I do that Chicksands Priory no longer remains to us, having suffered martyrdom at the bloody hands of the restorer. For through this, partly, we have attained to a knowledge of Dorothy’s surroundings, and may now safely let Dorothy herself tell us of the servants visiting her at Chicksands during those long seven years through which she remains constant to Temple. See what she expects in a lover! Have we not here some local squires hit off to the life? Could George Eliot have done more for us in like space?

“There are a great many ingredients must go to the making me happy in a husband. First, as my Cousin Franklin says our humours must agree, and to do that he must have that kind of breeding that I have had, and used that kind of company. That is, he must not be so much a country gentleman as to understand nothing but hawks and dogs, and be fonder of either than of his wife; nor of the next sort of them, whose aim reaches no farther than to be Justice of Peace, and once in his life High Sheriff, who reads no books but statutes, and studies nothing but how to make a speech interlarded with Latin, that may amaze his disagreeing poor neighbours, and fright them rather than persuade them into quietness. He must not be a thing that began the world in a free school, was sent from thence to the university, and is at his furthest when he reaches the Inns of Court, has no acquaintance but those of his form in those places, speaks the French he has picked out of old laws, and admires nothing but the stories he has heard of the revels that were kept there before his time. He must not be a town gallant neither, that lives in a tavern and an ordinary, that cannot imagine how an hour should be spent without company unless it be in sleeping, that makes court to all the women he sees, thinks they believe him, and laughs and is laughed at equally. Nor a travelled Monsieur, whose head is feather inside and outside, that can talk of nothing but of dances and duels, and has courage enough to wear slashes, when everybody else dies with cold to see him. He must not be a fool of no sort, nor peevish, nor ill-natured, nor proud, nor courteous; and to all this must be added, that he must love me, and I him, as much as we are capable of loving. Without all this his fortune, though never so great, would not satisfy me; and with it a very moderate one would keep me from ever repenting my disposal.”

These negative needs doubtless excluded many of the neighbours who were ready to throw themselves at her feet. But, from far and near, came many suitors, Cromwell’s son, Henry, among others; who will be “as acceptable to her,” she thinks, “as anybody else.” He seems almost worthy of her, if we believe most accounts of him, and allow for the Presbyterian animosity of good Mrs. Hutchinson. However, Henry Cromwell disappears from the scene, marrying elsewhere; whereby English history is possibly considerably modified. Temple is ordered to get her a dog, an Irish greyhound. “Henry Cromwell undertook to write to his brother Fleetwood, for another for me; but I have lost my hopes there; whomsoever it is that you employ, he will need no other instruction, but to get the biggest he can meet with. ’Tis all the beauty of those dogs, or of any, indeed, I think. A mastiff is handsomer to me than the most exact little dog that ever lady played withal.” Temple, no doubt, procured the biggest dog in Ireland, not the less joyfully that “she has lost her hopes of Henry Cromwell.”

There is another lover worthy of special mention—a widower—Sir Justinian Isham, of Lamport, Northamptonshire, pragmatical enough in his love suit, causing Mrs. Dorothy much amusement. She writes of him to Temple under the nickname “The Emperor.” This is the character she gives him: “He was the vainest, impertinent, self-conceited, learned coxcomb that ever yet I saw.” Hard words these!

The Emperor, it appears, caused further disagreement between Dorothy and her brother. Like the kettle in the Cricket on the Hearth, the Emperor began it. “The Emperor and his proposals began it; I talked merrily on’t till I saw my brother put on his sober face, and could hardly then believe he was in earnest. It seems he was; for when I had spoke freely my meaning, it wrought so with him, as to fetch up all that lay upon his stomach. All the people that I had ever in my life refused were brought again upon the stage, like Richard the III’s ghosts to reproach me withal, and all the kindness his discoveries could make I had for you was laid to my charge. My best qualities, if I have any that are good, served but for aggravations of my fault, and I was allowed to have wit, and understanding, and discretions, in all other things, that it might appear I had none in this. Well, ’twas a pretty lecture, and I grew warm with it after a while. In short, we came so near to an absolute falling out that ’twas time to give over, and we said so much then that we have hardly spoken a word together since. But ’tis wonderful to see what curtseys and legs pass between us, and as before we were thought the kindest brother and sister, we are certainly now the most complimental couple in England. ’Tis a strange change, and I am very sorry for it, but I’ll swear I know not how to help it.”

It is doubtless unpleasant to be pestered by an unwelcome suitor; however Dorothy has this compensation, that the Emperor’s proposals and letters give her mighty amusement.

“In my opinion, these great scholars are not the best writers (of letters I mean, of books perhaps they are); I never had, I think, but one letter from Sir Jus, but ’twas worth twenty of anybody’s else to make me sport. It was the most sublime nonsense that in my life I ever read, and yet I believe he descended as low as he could to come near my weak understanding. ’Twill be no compliment after this to say I like your letters in themselves, not as they come from one that is not indifferent to me, but seriously I do. All letters, methinks, should be free and easy as one’s discourse; not studied as an oration, nor made up of hard words like a charm. ’Tis an admirable thing to see how some people will labour to find out terms that may obscure a plain sense, like a gentleman I know, who would never say ‘the weather grew cold,’ but that ‘winter began to salute us.’ I have no patience at such coxcombs, and cannot blame an old uncle of mine that threw the standish at his man’s head, because he writ a letter for him, where, instead of saying (as his master bid him) ‘that he would have writ himself but that he had gout in his hand,’ he said, ‘that the gout in his hand would not permit him to put pen to paper.’”

The Emperor, it seems, this much to his credit, is much enamoured of Mrs. Dorothy; and does not take a refusal quietly. Or is she playing the coquette with him?

“Would you think it, that I have an ambassador from the Emperor Justinian, that comes to renew the treaty? In earnest ’tis true, and I want your counsel extremely what to do in it. You told me once that of all my servants you liked him the best. If I could so too, there were no dispute in’t. Well, I’ll think on’t, and if it succeed I will be as good as my word: you shall take your choice of my four daughters. Am not I beholding to him, think you? He says he has made addresses, ’tis true, in several places since we parted, but could not fix anywhere, and in his opinion he sees nobody that would make so fit a wife for himself as I. He has often inquired after me to know if I were not marrying: and somebody told him I had an ague, and he presently fell sick of one too, so natural a sympathy there is between us, and yet for all this, on my conscience we shall never marry. He desires to know whether I am at liberty or not. What shall I tell him, or shall I send him to you to know? I think that will be best. I’ll say that you are much my friend, and that I am resolved not to dispose of myself but with your consent and approbation; and therefore he must make all his court to you, and when he can bring me a certificate under your hand that you think him a fit husband for me, ’tis very likely I may have him; till then I am his humble servant, and your faithful friend.”

But, at length Sir Justinian marries some other fair neighbour, and vanishes from these pages; leaving, however, other lovers in the field seeking Dorothy’s hand. “I have a squire now,” she writes, “that is as good as a knight. He was coming as fast as a coach and six horses could bring him, but I desired him to stay till my ague was gone, and give me a little time to recover my good looks, for I protest if he saw me now he would never desire to see me again. Oh, me! I cannot think how I shall sit like the lady of the lobster, and give audience at Babram; you have been there, I am sure, nobody at Cambridge ’scapes it, but you were never so welcome thither as you shall be when I am mistress of it.” Also there comes to woo her “a modest, melancholy, reserved man, whose head is so taken up with little philosophical studies, that I admire how I found a room there.” A new servant is offered to her: “who had £2000 a year in present, with £2000 more to come. I had not the curiosity to ask who he was, which they took so ill that I think I shall hear no more of it.” Thus in one way or another, she gets rid of them all. But they are very importunate, these “servants,” as they style themselves, requiring wit and determination to send them about their business. Dorothy is determined to marry where she loves. “Surely,” she says, “the whole world could never persuade me (unless a parent commanded it) to marry one that I had no esteem for.” It is doubtful if a parent’s command would suffice, did Dorothy come face to face with such.

Here is a sharp refusal dramatically given to one importunate servant, Mr. James Fish by name (fancy Dorothy Osborne as Mrs. Fish), who would fain have become master. “I cannot forbear telling you the other day he made me a visit; and I, to prevent his making discourses to me, made Mrs. Goldsmith and Jane sit by all the while. But he came better provided than I could have imagined. He brought a letter with him, and gave it me as one that he had met with, directed to me; he thought it came out of Northamptonshire. I was upon my guard, and suspecting all he said, examined him so strictly where he had it, before I would open it, that he was hugely confounded, and I confirmed that ’twas his. I laid it by, and wished then that they would have left us, that I might have taken notice on’t to him. But I had forbid it them so strictly before, that they offered not to stir further than to look out of window, as not thinking there was any necessity of giving us their eyes as well as their ears; but he, that thought himself discovered, took that time to confess to me (in a whispering voice that I could hardly hear myself), that the letter (as my Lord Broghill says) was of great concern to him, and begged I would read it, and give him my answer. I took it up presently, as if I had meant it, but threw it sealed as it was into the fire, and told him (as softly as he had spoke to me) I thought that the quickest and best way of answering it. He sat awhile in great disorder without speaking a word, and so rose and took his leave. Now what think you; shall I ever hear of him more?” We think not, decidedly. He, like the others, recovers, doubtless to marry elsewhere.

But Temple’s father, Dorothy’s brother, and her solicitous servants, are not the only obstacles these lovers meet with. There are long separations at great distances when the lovers can hear but little of each other. Few meetings, and these at long intervals, break the monotony of Dorothy’s life of love.

’Tis not the loss of love’s assurance,

It is not doubting what thou art,

But ’tis the too, too long endurance

Of absence, that afflicts my heart.

Thus would Dorothy have written, perhaps, had she rhymed her thoughts in these days.

Now and again, indeed, Mrs. Dorothy is in London, “engaged to play and sup at the Three Kings,” or at Spring Gardens, Foxhall; enjoying for the time, as gay a life as is possible, in these Puritan days. But this is not the life for our Dorothy. “We go abroad all day,” she writes, “and play all night, and say our prayers when we have time. Well, in sober earnest, now, I would not live thus a twelvemonth, to gain all that the king has lost, unless it was to give it him again.” No! Dorothy’s life is at Chicksands tending her father, writing to her lover, reading romances sent to her by him, and crying real tears over the miseries of their poor pasteboard heroines. In those days Fielding was not, and the glories of fiction were unknown and quite unconceivable. Mr. Cowley’s verses reach her (in MS. Courtenay thinks), and occasional news of political matters. Here, set down in this dull priory house, she lives a calm domestic life without repining, without sympathy in her troubles. Is not this difficult; impossible to most, and worthy of a heroine? But, though her life is at Chicksands, her heart is far away with Temple; though her eyes are brimming with tears for the sorrows of Almanzar, it is because they mirror her troubles in their own weak fashion; and, whilst her soul is longing to commune with her lover, is it marvellous that by some mesmeric culture, she, quite untrained in literary skill, so portrays her thoughts that not only were they clearly uttered for Temple, but remain to us, clothed in the power of clear intention, honesty of expression, and kindly wit?

Perhaps, in these seven long apprentice years to matrimony, Dorothy had no trouble causing her more real anguish than her fears concerning Temple’s religious belief. Gossiping Bishop Burnet, in one of his more ill-natured passages, tells us that Temple was an Epicurean, thinking religion to be fit only for the mob; and a corrupter of all that came near him. Unkind words these, with just perhaps those dregs of truth in them, which make gossip so hard to bear patiently. Temple, I take it, was too intelligent not to see the hollow, noisy, drum nature of much of the religion around him; preferred also, as young men will do, to air speculative opinions rather than consider them; hence the bishop’s censure. Was it true, as Courtenay thinks, that jealousy of King William’s attachment to Temple, disturbed the episcopal equipoise of soul, rendering his Lordship slanderous, even a backbiter? To us, brother servants of Dorothy, this matters not. Sufficient pity is it, that Dorothy is forced to write to her lover in such words as these: “I tremble at the desperate things you say in your letter: for the love of God, consider seriously with yourself what can enter into comparison with the safety of your soul? Are a thousand women or ten thousand worlds worth it? No, you cannot have so little reason left as you pretend, nor so little religion; for God’s sake let us not neglect what can only make us happy for a trifle. If God had seen it fit to have satisfied our desires, we should have had them, and everything would not have conspired thus to cross them; since He has decreed it otherwise (at least as far as we are able to judge by events) we must submit, and not by striving make an innocent passion a sin, and show a childish stubbornness. I could say a thousand things more to this purpose if I were not in haste to send this away, that it may come to you at least as soon as the other.

Adieu.”

Thus, you see, Dorothy is not without her fears; but, though she can write thus to her lover, yet, when he is attacked by her brother, she is ready to defend him; having at heart that real faith in his righteousness, without which there could be no love. “All this,” she writes in another letter, “I can say to you; but when my brother disputes it with me, I have other arguments for him, and I drove him up so close t’other night, that for want of a better gap to get out at, he was fain to say that he feared as much your having a fortune as your having none, for he saw you held my Lord S.’s principles; that religion and honour were things you did not consider at all; and that he was confident you would take any engagement, serve in any employment, or do anything to advance yourself. I had no patience for this: to say you were a beggar, your father not worth £4,000 in the whole world, was nothing in comparison of having no religion, nor no honour. I forgot all my disguise, and we talked ourselves weary; he renounced me again, and I defied him.”

There is no religious twaddle in Dorothy’s letters; her religion grew from within herself, and was not the distorted reflection of Scriptural beliefs coloured by modern sympathies and antipathies. She does not satisfy her tendency towards righteousness by the mock humility of constant self-abasement, or by the juggling misapplication of texts of Scripture. Indeed, the depth of her faith and belief is not to be seen on the surface of these letters—hardly, indeed, to be understood at all, I think, except from the charitable tendency of her thoughts, her deep silences and self-restraint. Dorothy, it appears, sees with her clear smiling eyes quite through the loudly-expressed longings for the next world, which had helped to put some prominent men of the time in high places in this. “We complain,” she writes, “of this world and the variety of crosses and afflictions it abounds in and yet for all this who is weary on’t (more than in discourse), who thinks with pleasure of leaving it or preparing for the next? We see old folks that have outlived all the comforts of life desire to continue it and nothing can wean us from the folly of preferring a mortal being, subject to great infirmity and unavoidable decays, before an immortal one, and all the glories that are promised with it. Is this not very like preaching? Well, ’tis too good for you—you shall have no more on’t. I am afraid you are not mortified enough for such discourses to work upon, though I am not of my brother’s opinion neither, that you have no religion in you. In earnest, I never took anything he ever said half so ill, as nothing is so great an injury. It must suppose one to be the devil in human shape.”

Seven long years! Which of you, my readers, has waited this time without a murmur and without a doubt? Was not this an acting of faith far higher than any letter writing of it? Let us think so, and honour it as such. Here is a letter, written when doubt almost overwhelmed, when the spleen (a disease as common now as then, though we have lost the good name for it) was upon her, when the world looked blank, and life a drifting mist of despair.

“Let me tell you that if I could help it I would not love you, and that as long as I live I shall strive against it, as against that which has been my ruin, and was certainly sent me as a punishment for my sins. But I shall always have a sense of your misfortunes equal if not above my own; I shall pray that you may obtain quiet I never hope for but in my grave, and I shall never change my condition but with my life. Yet let not this give you a hope. Nothing can ever persuade me to enter the world again; I shall in a short time have disengaged myself of all my little affairs in it and settled myself in a condition to apprehend nothing but too long a life, and therefore I wish you to forget me, and to induce you to it let me tell you freely that I deserve you should. If I remember anybody ’tis against my will; I am possessed with that strange insensibility that my nearest relations have no tie upon me, and I find myself no more concerned in those that I have heretofore had great tenderness of affection for, than if they had died long before I was born; leave me to this, and seek a better fortune: I beg it of you as heartily as I forgive you all those strange thoughts you have had of me; think me so still if that will do anything towards it, for God’s sake so, take any course that may make you happy, or if that cannot be, less unfortunate at least than

Your friend and humble servant,

D. Osborne.”

Such letters are, happily, not numerous. Here is another, of a quite different nature, in which you can read the practical English sense of our Dorothy, and her thoughts about love in a cottage:—

“I have not lived thus long in the world, and in this age of changes, but certainly I know what an estate is; I have seen my father’s reduced better than £4,000 to not £400 a year, and I thank God I never felt the change in anything that I thought necessary. I never wanted, and am confident I never shall. But yet I would not be thought so inconsiderate a person as not to remember that it is expected from all people that have sense that they should act with reason; that to all persons some proportion of fortune is necessary, according to their several qualities, and though it is not required that one should tie oneself to just so much, and something is left for one’s inclination, and the difference in the persons to make, yet still within such a compass; (a little incoherent this, meaning, I think, that Dorothy does not believe that even the world would have you choose by money and goods alone), and such as lay more upon these considerations than they will bear, shall infallibly be condemned by all sober persons. If any accident out of my power should bring me to necessity though never so great, I should not doubt with God’s assistance, but to bear it as well as anybody, and I should never be ashamed on’t if He pleased to send it me; but if by my own folly I had put it upon myself, the case would be extremely altered.” But this is Dorothy in her serious strain; often (how often?) she plays the lover, and though I disapprove of peeping into such letters, doubting if Cupid recognises any statute of limitations in these affairs, yet to complete the fabric we must play eavesdropper for once.

“It will be pleasinger to you, I am sure, to tell you how fond I am of your lock. Well, in earnest now, and setting aside all compliment I never saw finer hair, nor of a better colour; but cut no more of it. I would not have it spoiled for the world; if you love me be careful of it; I am combing and curling and kissing this lock all day, and dreaming of it all night. The ring, too, is very well, only a little of the biggest. Send me a tortoiseshell one to keep it on, that is a little less than that I sent for a pattern. I would not have the rule absolutely true without exception, that hard hairs are ill-natured, for then I should be so; but I can allow that all soft hairs are good, and so are you, or I am deceived as much as you are, if you think I do not love you enough. Tell me, my dearest, am I? You will not be if you think I am not yours.”

Space! space! how narrow, how harsh, and ungallant thou art; not ready to give place, even to Dorothy herself. We must hasten to the end. Dorothy, it appears, unlike some of her sex, does not like playing the Mrs. Bride in a public wedding. “I never yet,” she writes, “saw anyone that did not look simply and out of countenance, nor ever knew a wedding well designed but one, and that was of two persons who had time enough I confess to contrive it, and nobody to please in’t but themselves. He came down into the country where she was upon a visit, and one morning married her. As soon as they came out of the church, they took coach and came for the town, dined at an inn by the way, and at night came into lodgings that were provided for them, where nobody knew them, and where they passed for married people of seven years’ standing. The truth is I could not endure to be Mrs. Bride in a public wedding, to be made the happiest person on earth; do not take it ill, for I would endure it if I could, rather than fail, but in earnest I do not think it were possible for me.”

But her father is now dead. Her brother, Peyton, is to make the treaty for her. Here is the letter, dated for once (Oct. 2, 1654), inviting Temple to come, and she will name the day; at least, Courtenay tells us, that in this interview the preliminaries were settled. “After a long debate with myself how to satisfy you, and remove that rock (as you call it) which in your apprehensions is of no great danger, I am at last resolved to let you see that I value your affection for me at as high a rate as you yourself can set it, and that you cannot have more of tenderness for me and my interests than I shall ever have for yours. The particulars how I intend to make this good, you shall know when I see you, which, since I find them here more irresolute in point of time (though not as to the journey itself) than I hoped they would have been, notwithstanding your quarrel to me, and the apprehensions you would make me believe you have that I do not care to see you—pray come hither, and try whether you shall be welcome or not.”

And now one moment of suspense. A last trial to the lover’s constancy. The bride is taken dangerously ill. So seriously ill that the doctors rejoice when the disease pronounces itself to be small-pox. Alas! who shall now say what are the inmost thoughts of our Dorothy? Does she not now need all her faith in her lover, in herself, ay, and in God, to uphold her in this new affliction. She rises from her bed, her beauty of face destroyed; her fair looks living only on the painter’s canvas, unless we may believe that they were etched in deeply bitten lines on Temple’s heart. But this skin beauty is not the firmest hold she has on Temple’s affections; this was not the beauty that had attracted her lover, and held him enchained in her service for seven years of waiting and suspense; this was not the only light leading him through dark days of doubt, almost of despair, constant, unwavering in his troth to her. Other beauty, not outward, of which I may not write, having seen it but darkly, only through these letters; knowing it indeed to be there, but quite unable to visualise it fully, or to paint it clearly on these pages; other beauty it is, than that of face and form, that made Dorothy to Temple and to all men, in fact, as she was in name—the gift of God.

They are wedded, says Courtenay, at the end of 1654; and thus my task ends. Of Lady Temple there is little to know, and this is not the place to set it down. She lies on the north side of the west aisle at Westminster, with her husband and children.

“Her body sleeps in Capel’s monument,

And her immortal past with angels lives.”

You, reading for yourself, will perhaps gaze upon the darkened tablet, with new interest; and may, perhaps, thank him who has shown you this picture. Yes, thank him, not as author or historian, but as a servant holding a lamp, but ill-trimmed may be, before a glowing picture, careful that what light he holds, may not glisten on its shining surface, and hide the painting from sight; or as a menial, drawing aside with difficulty the heavy, dusty curtain of intervening ages which has veiled from human eyes the beautiful figure of Dorothy Osborne. She herself is the picture, and the painter of it; the historian of her own history. But not even to her are the real thanks due; these must be humbly offered to Him from whom she came to represent

“A holy woman and the perfect wife.”