Yet the younger performers in the play of “All for Love,” to which the good-natured Bishop wrote a prologue, thought his effusions, no doubt, of the highest merit; and they turned upon a subject which they could both comprehend and enjoy, the great exploits of Marlborough. Perhaps it was the Bishop’s elaborate verses which occasioned the Duchess’s aversion to poetry, when so employed, and which produced the clause in her will, bequeathing to Glover and to Mallet one thousand pounds, upon condition of their not inserting a single line of verse in the biography which they had engaged to write of her husband.[257] “All for Love”[258] was enacted with all the proprieties, the Duchess “scratching out some of the most amorous speeches, and no embrace allowed.”[259] “In short, no offence to the company,” Miss Cairnes, daughter of Sir Alexander Cairnes of Monaghan, and afterwards married to Cadwallader, eighth Baron Blayney,[260] was domesticated in the Marlborough family at the request of the Duchess, who, esteeming her mother, Lady Cairnes, took the daughter into her family and brought her up with her granddaughters, under the care of a governess, Mrs. La Vie, a relation of Lady Cairnes, and the daughter of a French refugee. Both these ladies were important additions to the social enjoyments of Holywell, or the Lodge. Lady Blayney, who lived to the age of eighty, became and continued an attached friend to the family. Her recollections furnished the descendants of the famed Duke with several anecdotes of their ancestors, and amongst others with the foregoing account of the play. Mrs. La Vie, the other inmate of the family, was a woman also of considerable attainments. She translated into French a letter addressed by the Duchess to George the First, on one occasion, in order to clear up some suspicions of her loyalty. Mrs. La Vie was also a frequent visitant amongst the select parties given under the agreeable form of suppers, by Lady Darlington, to George the First, where, excepting his Majesty, persons of taste and distinguished talent were alone admitted.[261] Surrounded by this agreeable domestic society, the Duke and Duchess might have expected to pass serenely into an old age of peace. But both public and private events occurred, which depressed, though they could not render morose, a mind so kindly and amiably constituted as that of Marlborough, whilst certain circumstances aroused once more the fiery spirit of the Duchess, who rejoiced in the whirlwind. She had lived to see, among other strange vicissitudes, her former foe, Harley, deprived not only of power, but of liberty; he had been imprisoned two years in the Tower, when his impeachment, and the sudden abandonment of that contested measure, excited public curiosity as to the cause of so unaccountable an affair.