I dined at Sir Stephen Fox's, and went contented home to my poor but quiet villa. What contentment can there be in the riches and splendour of this world, purchased with vice and dishonour!" "There was, in truth, little of contentment within those sumptuous walls;" a weak queen helpless under the indignities imposed upon her, a duchess burning with passionate resentment, and light-hearted Nell Gwynn laughing with amusement; a group of courtiers and courtesans with little sense of honor, tossed about by conflicting emotions of fear and jealousy, perplexity and heartaches; involved in disgraceful intrigues and malicious conspiracies; attended by all the demons which wait upon the mind that has sold itself to sordidness and sin; mocked at by a troupe of perfidious spirits of pride, avarice, and ambition--such was the company within the palace walls that opened to receive the woman who was to be, if possible, the most despicable of them all, and certainly the most detested. In pleasing contrast to the fashionable and often brilliant debauchees of the court of Charles II. may be placed the Countess de Grammont, to whom the description of the poet Fletcher applies: "A woman of that rare behaviour, So qualified, that admiration Dwells round about her; of that perfect spirit, That admirable carriage, That sweetness in discourse--young as the morning, Her blushes staining his." She moved in the profligate sphere of the English court, and later in that of France, without for a moment having the brilliancy of her intellect, the acuteness of her wit, or the whiteness of her character tarnished by vulgarity of action or of word. Importuned by lovers of high degree for alliances that were not regarded as compromising in that gay atmosphere, and, when it was found futile to seek to entice her into an equivocal position, as ardently sought by the beaux for the honorable relation of wife, she held them all at arm's length. Strong and resolute, she, like a brilliant moth, circled about the passionate flame of the English court without singeing her wings, neither did she seek, by an adventitious flame of responsive passion, to draw on to haplessness any of the courtiers who sought her with ardent protestations of affection. Though light-hearted and vivacious, she had none of the arts of a coquette; but when the persistence of the Comte de Grammont convinced her, in spite of the scepticism which her surroundings created, and of his known character of frivolity, that in him she might find a faithful and devoted husband, she allowed her heart to hold sway of her destiny and yielded herself in marriage to him. It had been better for her, however, if she had remained a maid of honor than to have become, by marriage to an unprincipled man, a wife of dishonor. The exceptional worth of character, the brilliancy of intellect, and the steadiness of purpose which La Belle Hamilton exhibited, did not, in the eyes of the voluptuous count, constitute