Nearly sixty years ago there was a queen of hearts in London who broke as many as she could, voluntarily or involuntarily. She was a Miss Acklom, daughter of a Nottinghamshire squire. Down at Exmouth, amid the loveliness and the idleness of the place, the nymph and a gallant officer named Tilson fell in love, or seemed to do so, with each other. The warrior, at all events, was deeply smitten, and marriage was to plunge him still deeper in love; but, almost at the church door, the cruel nymph declined to go further. The lover went straightway abroad. After a while, Miss Acklom was subdued by another wooer, Mr. Maddox; the beauty consented to become his wife. As the time of the nuptials drew near the lady’s grandfather died. She went into mourning, and came out of it with an announcement of a quality to put her lover into it; namely, that she had changed her mind. Like Tilson, Maddox sought solace in going to the stirring scenes abroad. Jackson wrote from his quarters at Dijon, in 1814, that the swain so ill-treated by Venus was ‘trying his luck with Mars, as an amateur.... From being a very handsome and lively-tempered young man, he has become quite the reverse.’ While two lovers were despairing a third presented himself. He was no other than that Lord Althorpe, who became so distinguished in the House of Commons as a statesman and a minister. My lord was accepted. Just as the marriage was about to take place this third lover’s grandmother died; whereupon the nymph put on mourning and went down to Bath to live in retirement. Old Mrs. Jackson prophesied that Miss Acklom would, on coming out of mourning, jilt the heir to an earldom as she had done ‘poor Maddox.’ George replied that Tilson had recently returned to England, a general, and ‘this perhaps may win her smiles again.’ Lord Althorpe proved to be a successful swain. Esther Acklom married him, about a month after Mrs. Jackson had presaged that she would play this lover false. The wedding was celebrated in April 1815, and in little more than three years the once volatile nymph was carried to her grave, leaving a childless widower to mourn a good wife’s loss.