The child, when at her country seat, became a great favourite with the wife of Lord Berwick's brother, Mrs. Hill, and all went on charmingly, till Charlotte began to look like a woman, and one of such uncommon loveliness, as to attract the attention of all the elegant young men in the neighbourhood. Sophia could not endure this. Even at the Opera, many a man has preferred offering his arm to Charlotte; nay, it was said, a country gentleman of very large property was expected to make Charlotte an honourable proposal. This was too much. Poor Charlotte, after having forsaken the profession in which she must have succeeded, to be bred up in luxury among nobility, who looked on her as half an angel, was bundled off to a country school, there to earn her daily bread by birching young, vulgar misses, and teaching them their French and English grammar, and there has poor Charlotte been forced to bloom unseen, wasting her sweetness on the desert air ever since. Patronage is a fine thing! I should like to know what Charlotte says about it as she sits darning her cotton stockings on a Saturday night. * * * * * My time in London passed on pleasantly enough at this period, as I went wherever I pleased. The only drawback to my comfort was that the Duke of Beaufort did nothing but write and torment Lord Worcester to leave me, while Worcester's love seemed to increase on the receipt of every scolding letter. He daily swore to make me his wife, and professed to be wretched, whenever I desired him not to think of marriage. Her Grace of Beaufort's letters to her son, which I always had the honour of perusing, were extremely eloquent on my subject. The duchess, unlike Lord Frederick Bentinck, was fond of hard words. "This absurd attachment of yours for this vile profligate woman, does but prove," wrote this noble personage, "the total subjugation of your understanding." In answer to this nervous paragraph, one of Her Grace's epistles, I beg leave to correct the word subjugation. Not that there is any harm in it, on the contrary it is a very learned kind of a full sounding expression and looks handsome in a letter, but then it is too learned to be so ignorantly misapplied. Her Grace, in her zeal to be fine, must have mistaken it for something else, since I can offer an unanswerable reason why her hopeful son, Worcester, could not have his understanding subjugated even by the wonderful charms of Harriette Wilson, and that in four simple words:--He never possessed any.