This cessation of the treaty is explained by the Duchess of Marlborough, in the curious correspondence from which this narrative is taken. The original proposal, on her side, to Lord Clare, was to be so managed as to save him the pain of sending her grace a refusal, if he declined it: a negociation, with respect to fortune, was carried on between Vanburgh and a mutual friend of Lord Clare and of the Duchess. As it might be expected, the treaty had gone on very smoothly, until the conversation turned upon money. Some “civil things about the alliance,” to use the Duchess’s phrase, had been said; but the dowry required to make the plain Lady Harriott saleable was no less a sum than forty thousand pounds. Upon this demand the Duchess had broken off the negociation, concluding, as she afterwards declared, that the Duke of Newcastle or his friends must think such a demand the most effectual way of breaking off the affair; “since,” as she added, “Lady Harriott was neither a ‘monster nor a citizen,’ and she had never heard of such a fortune in any other case, unless it were an only child.” Yet to show, as she states, that she was not mercenary, she had afterwards refused a most considerable offer for her granddaughter, where she could have had her own conditions. In such business-like and bartering terms did the custom of the day lead the Duchess to express herself upon a matter of no less importance than happiness, or unhappiness, the utmost bliss or the most hopeless misery. Two years, therefore, had elapsed before anything more was done; and Lady Harriott, meantime, had been introduced by her grandmother into the fashionable circles of Bath; and that circumstance again aroused the apprehensions of the cautious Pelham Holles. Whether he dreaded that she would there have formed some acquaintance which might have produced an entanglement of the heart—whether he fancied that the influence which her grandmother exercised over her might induce the young lady to accept a desirable match when her affections were elsewhere bestowed; or whether he was merely desirous of ascertaining how far the scenes of dissipation had power to elicit foibles and failings in the young Lady Harriott—does not appear. From the strict inquiries which he anxiously and repeatedly made when the treaty was renewed, of her conduct at Bath, we must however conclude that the peer, in spite of his determination to marry before the winter was over, was not so indiscreet in his haste as to rush into bonds, unless he were well satisfied that they would produce a happy union. Such were his notions of the sex at this time, that, to use his own words to Vanburgh, he almost despaired of meeting with a woman whose ideas of conjugal duty would accord with his own expectations. Impressed with the difficulty of a choice, he earnestly and emphatically entreated Sir John Vanburgh to inform him if he knew anything of the lady, that could abate the extraordinary impression that