Lady Mary followed this narrative with her reflections.  She was sure that all these adventures proceeded from artifice on one side and weakness on the other.  “An honest, tender mind,” she says, “is betrayed to ruin by the charms that make the fortune of a designing head, which, when joined with a beautiful face, can never fail of advancement, except barred by a wise mother, who locks up her daughters from view till nobody cares to look on them.”  She instanced the case of “my poor friend” the Duchess of Bolton, who “was educated in solitude, with some choice books, by a saint-like governess:  crammed with virtue and good qualities, she thought it impossible not to find gratitude, though she failed to give passion; and upon this plan threw away her estate, was despised by her husband, and laughed at by the public.”  Lady Mary compared the case of the Duchess with that of “Polly, bred in an ale-house, and produced on the stage, who has obtained wealth and title, and found the way to be esteemed.”  This particular instance hardly furnishes the basis for the general rule laid down by her:  “So useful is early experience—­without it half of life is dissipated in correcting the errors that we have been taught to receive as indisputable truths.”  According to all accounts Charles Paulet, third Duke of Bolton, was at the age of twenty-eight forced by his father to marry Lady Anne Vaughan, only daughter and heiress of John, Earl of Carbery.  When the old Duke died in 1722 they separated.  Some years later the Duke took for his mistress Lavinia Fenton, the “Polly” in Gay’s “Beggar’s Opera.”  On the death of his wife in 1751 he married her.

Henry Fielding, was Lady Mary’s second cousin; but there had never been any intimacy between them, although some acquaintance.  The novelist was eighteen years the younger.  In 1727, when he was twenty and near the beginning of his career as a playwright, he had consulted her about his comedy, “Love in Several Masques,” of which, when it was published in the following year, he sent her a copy.  “I have presumed to send your Ladyship a copy of the play which you did me the honour of reading three acts last spring and hope it may meet as light a censure from your Ladyship’s judgment as then; for while your goodness permits me (what I esteem the greatest and indeed only happening of my life) to offer my unworthy performances to your perusal, it will be entirely from your sentence that they will be regarded or disesteemed by me.”  Fielding wrote Lady Mary another letter about four years later:  “I hope your Ladyship will honour the scenes which I presume to lay before you, with your perusal.  As they are written on a model I never yet attempted, I am exceedingly anxious less they should find less mercy from you than my lighter productions.  It will be a slight compensation to ’The Modern Husband’ that your Ladyship’s censure will defend him from the possibility of any other reproof, since your least approbation will always give me pleasure, infinitely superior to the loudest applauses of a theatre.  For whatever has passed your judgment may, I think, without any imputation of immodesty, refer want of success to want of judgment in an audience.  I shall do myself the honour of waiting upon your Ladyship at Twickenham to receive my sentence.”