Yet it was this untaught mind, disturbed often by bursts of passion, and in love with wealth and all other worldly advantages,—it was the Duchess of Marlborough, who, of all her class, was the first to detect the fallacy of that scheme by which a whole nation had been ensnared. When the value of the stock rose to an unprecedented height, and the public were more than ever infatuated by false hopes, she saved her husband and her family from ruin, not only by her foresight but by her firmness. Let those who would wholly preclude women from any participation in masculine affairs, remember how often their less biassed judgment, their less employed hours, have been made available to warn and to save. The Duchess happily had sufficient influence over her husband to rescue his disposable property from any further investment in the South Sea Stock. She resisted all the entreaties of Sunderland to employ any further portion of capital in the scheme; she foresaw that no profit would now satisfy the public mind, excited to an unnatural degree, and predicted that the fall of the stock would be as rapid as the rise. She not only withheld the Duke’s hand, but persecuted him to sell out his shares, by which prudent step he realised, it is said, a hundred thousand pounds;[267] and this clear-sightedness on the Duchess’s part was the more admirable that it was wholly singular. It was the age of speculation and of companies; and many of the nobility were at the head of some new ephemeral speculation. The Prince of Wales was made governor of the Welsh Copper Company; the Duke of Chandos, of the York Buildings; and the Duke of Bridgewater formed a third for building houses in London.[268] Whilst these bubbles were engaging the public mind, the blow which severed Marlborough for ever from public life, and rendered even his beloved home cheerless, was struck whilst he was yet mourning at Holywell-house the death of his beloved daughters, more especially of the Countess of Sunderland. Throughout the whole of his life the Duke had suffered from intense headaches and giddiness,—warnings disregarded, as they often are, in the feverish pursuit of power, in the race for worldly honours, which the exhausted mind and irritable nerves permit not, ofttimes, even the most successful to enjoy.