But in September he emerges unexpectedly at Gravesend, newly married, and ready to sail for Rhode Island, “in a ship of 250 tons which he had hired.” The marriage, according to Stock, took place on August 1, whether in Ireland or in England I cannot tell. The lady was Anne, daughter of John Forster, late Chief Justice, and then Speaker of the Irish House of Commons. She shared his fortune when he was about to engage in the most romantic, and ideally the grandest, Christian mission of the eighteenth century. According to tradition she was a devoutly religious mystic: Fénelon and Madame Guyon were among her favourites. “I chose her,” he tells Lord Percival, “for her qualities of mind and her unaffected inclination to books. She goes with great thankfulness, to live a plain farmer’s life, and wear stuff of her own spinning. I have presented her with a spinning-wheel.” A letter to Prior, dated “Gravesend September 5, 1728,” thus describes the little party on the eve of their departure:—“To-morrow, with God’s blessing, I set sail for Rhode Island, with my wife and a friend of hers, my Lady Handcock’s daughter, who bears us company. I am married since I saw you to Miss Forster, whose humour and turn of mind pleases me beyond anything that I know in her whole sex. Mr. James(15), Mr. Dalton, and Mr. Smibert(16) go with us on this voyage. We are now all together at Gravesend, and are engaged in one view.” We are further told(17) that they carried stores and goods to a great value, and that the Dean “embarked 20,000 books, besides what the two gentlemen carried. They sailed in September for Rhode Island, where the Dean intends to winter, and to purchase an estate, in order to settle a correspondence and trade between that island and Bermudas.” Berkeley was in his forty-fourth year, when, full of glowing visions of Christian Empire in the West, “Time’s noblest offspring,” he left England, on his way to Bermuda, with the promise of Sir Robert Walpole that he should receive the promised grant after he had made an investment. He bought land in America, but he never reached Bermuda. Towards the end of January, in 1729, the little party, in the “hired ship of 250 tons,” made their appearance in Narragansett Bay, on the western side of Rhode Island. “Blundering about the ocean,” they had touched at Virginia on the way, whence a correspondent, sceptical of the enterprise, informs Lord Percival that the Dean “had dined with the Governor, and visited our College,” but thinks that “when the Dean comes to put his visionary scheme into practice, he will find it no better than a religious frenzy,” and that “he is as much a Don Quixote in zeal as that renowned knight was in chivalry. I wish the good Dean may not find out at last that Waller really kidnapt him over to Bermuda, and that the project he has been drawn into may not prove in every point of it poetical.”