their readiness to allow him to renew his former habits with them. He was penetrated, and deeply grateful, but said he dared not profit by it while his entanglement with Hortense continued. He would not shock them, he said, by bringing his unworthy person into their presence. Meantime, all Granville's endeavours to procure the separation so much desired between him and his mistress failed. An immense settlement did not tempt her; she was about to make him a third time a father, and perceived by its effect upon him what advantage it gave her towards her object. In short, to use his own emphatic words, it plunged him deeper and deeper in the filth of his situation, by clogging more and more his attempts to extricate himself from it; so that the morals of English society (after all that has been said of our corruptions) not permitting a man with his inconvenient feelings of propriety to shew himself here, he fairly renounced his country, and all his brilliant advantages in it, and settled himself at Paris. There, a complete alien, he found himself without power to turn either his talents or fortune to account abroad, or to obtain peace or comfort from his ill-selected companion at home. On the contrary, his pledges of guilty intercourse (for he would not call it pleasure) increasing, he for their sakes consented, at forty, to marry Hortense, who was as old as himself, then deprived of all personal attractions, and wholly without power to compensate the loss by any mental endowments. Their life, therefore, may be imagined. Every thing like attachment having long been over-he despising her, and she never having loved himtheir union was a perpetual bickering, and she would now have gladly consented to a separation, provided he would have allowed the children to follow her, which he refused. But even these, whose education and welfare were the only interests he had left, failed to give him what he thought, as a father, he had a right to expect. Not because they had any particular faults of character; on the contrary, they were amiable; but unfortunately, this very circumstance made his regrets more poignant. "They are bastards," said he," and not presentable in the world; they are not even pledges of love, and therefore give no pleasure at home; their very merits reproach me the more, for having deprived them of their natural rights." In this state of mortification he dragged on many years, after being delivered by death from the millstone which had sunk him. But his estates being entailed, he could make no provision for his numerous progeny, except by savings, which he pushed to such an extreme of parsimony, that only with the character of a miser, and a sordid exterior, this once gay, liberal, and accomplished man returned to the hall of his ancestors; where, from long absence, and his misspent life, he found nothing in the respect of friends or neighbours to welcome him home, and looked in vain to the approbation of his own conscience to cheer and console him in his age. CHAPTER XXII. A WEDDING-DAY UNLIKE ALL OTHER WEDDING DAYS TO BE FOUND IN ROMANCES; HAVING NO SHEW, THOUGH MUCH HAPPINESS.-SWEET CONSCIOUSNESS SHEWN BY BERTHA. The wedding, mannerly modest. SHAKSPEARE.—Much Ado About Nothing. I have mark'd A thousand blushing apparitions To start into her face; a thousand innocent shames, Idem. THE chronology of facts as they arose, and the importance of the catastrophe of Sir Harry Melford, alone induced me to interrupt the chain of cheerful and happy events which now occupy these memoirs. I with pleasure return, to record the ceremony which united Granville and Lady Hungerford. From the taste and temper of the parties, and Mr. Hastings' infirm state of health, the wedding and wedding-day of the beloved friends passed rather in happy calm than mirthful exaltation. Though the pattern of elegance and queen of fashion, as I have often called her, Lady Hungerford was attired at the ceremony in the simplicity almost of a village maiden. No pompous ornaments; no laced veils flowing from head to foot, and enveloping her graceful limbs; not even one of her dazzling jewelled bracelets, to outshine and put out of countenance the modest wedding ring, which Granville placed upon her finger. A gown of plain white silk, and a flower in her dark glossy hair, were all the display she chose to make. maid, Mrs. Barbara, was by far the most distinguished figure of the two; as (to follow her example) the faithful Margaret was superior to her young mistress, who, as bride's-maid, was arrayed in equal simplicity with her friend. Her But exclusive of the temper of mind in which those most concerned found themselves, there were no great family feelings or prospects aroused by the event. Granville was no rich heir, to call upon an extended tenantry or neighbourhood of friends to compliment him with joy and jollity on his entering on his new estate; and his accomplished and noble wife had been too much used to pomp and festivity not to wish to give play to her natural taste and disposition, which, without hating or despising grandeur, were made for something better. She therefore, with her whole heart, preferred the |