The session of Parliament was languishing towards a conclusion, when a Bill sent down from the Lords to the Commons, and which had passed almost without notice through the former House, having been carried by an hundred Lords against the Duke of Bedford and eleven others, raised, or gave occasion to raise, extraordinary heats. This was the famous _Marriage Bill_; an Act of such notoriety, and on which so very much was said at the time, and on which so much has been written since, that it would be almost impossible, at least very wearisome, to particularize the Debates, and very unnecessary to enter much into the state of the question. Some of the most particular passages, such as tend to illustrate or explain the characters, the politics, and the factions of the time, I shall, according to my custom, succinctly touch. The Bill had been originally moved by my Lord Bath, who, attending a Scotch cause, was struck with the hardship of a matrimonial case, in which a man, after a marriage of thirty years, was claimed by another woman on a pre-contract. The Judges were ordered to frame a Bill that should remedy so cruel a retrospect. They did; but drew it so ill, and it was three times printed so inaccurately, that the Chancellor was obliged to give it ample correction. Whether from mere partiality to an ordinance thus become his own, or whether in shaping a law, new views of power opened to a mind fond of power, fond of dictating; so it was, that the Chancellor gave all his attention to a statute into which he had breathed the very spirit of aristocracy and insolent nobility. It was amazing, in a country where liberty gives choice, where trade and money confer equality, and where facility of marriage had always been supposed to produce populousness,--it was amazing to see a law promulged, that cramped inclination, that discountenanced matrimony, and that seemed to annex as sacred privileges to birth, as could be devised in the proudest, poorest little Italian principality; and as if the artificer had been a Teutonic Margrave, not a little lawyer, who had raised himself by his industry from the very lees of the people; and who had matched his own blood with the great house of _Kent_!