’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.”