A strange motive to enmity is illustrated in the life of General Loudoun, one of the Scotch Jacobites, who, on the defeat of his party, entered the Austrian service, and rose to the rank of field-marshal in the wars of Maria Theresa. He had taken the town of Seidlitz from the Prussians. It was a great stroke in favor of the empress queen, and might have been rewarded with a coronet, but, in his haste to send her majesty the intelligence, Loudoun transmitted it through her husband, the Emperor Francis, who had a private interest in the matter, having long carried on a speculation of his own in victualling not only his wife's troops, but those of her Prussian enemy. King Maria, as she was styled by her Hungarian subjects, had also some special reasons for allowing him to have neither hand nor voice in her concerns--a fact which the marshal had never learned, or forgotten; and her majesty was so indignant at receiving the news through such a channel, that, though she struck a medal to commemorate the taking of Seidlitz, Loudoun was rewarded only with her peculiar aversion throughout the remaining seventeen years of her reign, for which the good wishes of that imperial speculator in forage and flour afforded but poor consolation. Of all the important steps of human life, that by which two are made one appears to be taken from the greatest variety of motives. Doubtless, from the beginning it was not so; but manifold and heterogeneous are those which have been alleged for it in the civilized world. Goethe said he married to attain popular respectability. Wilkes, once called the Patriot, when sueing his wife, who chanced to have been an heiress, for the remains of her property, declared that he had wedded at twenty-two, solely to please his friends; and Wycherly the poet, in his very last days, worshipped and endowed with all his worldly goods, as the English service hath it, a girl whom poverty had made unscrupulous, in order to be revenged on his relations. Princes of old were in the habit of marrying to cement treaties, which were generally broken as soon after as possible; and simple citizens are still addicted to the same method of amending their fortunes and families. There was an original motive to double blessedness set forth in the advice of a veteran sportsman in one of the border counties. His niece was the heiress of broad lands, which happened to adjoin an estate belonging to a younger brother of the turf; and the senior gentleman, when dilating to her on the exploits they had performed together by wood and wold, wound up with the following sage counsel--"Maria, take my advice, and marry young Beechwood, and you'll see this county hunted in style."