This man had from nature a very happy address, formed to win much upon the hearts of unexperienced girls; and his two cousins respected him greatly.  He placed them at the house of an old, out-of-fashion aunt, who had been a keen partizan of the royal cause during the civil wars; she was full of the heroic stiffness of her own times, and would read books of Chivalry, and Romances with her spectacles.

This sort of conversation, much infected the mind of our poetess, and fill’d her imagination with lovers, heroes, and princes; made her think herself in an inchanted region, and that all the men who approached her were knights errant.  In a few years the old aunt died, and left the two young ladies without any controul; which as soon as their cousin Mr. Manley heard, he hasted into the country, to visit them; appeared in deep mourning, as he said for the death of his wife; upon which the young ladies congratulated him, as they knew his wife was a woman of a most turbulent temper, and ill fitted to render the conjugal life tolerable.

This gentleman, who had seen a great deal of the world, and was acquainted with all the artifices of seducing, lost no time in making love to his cousin, who was no otherwise pleased with it, than as it answered something to the character she had found in those books, which had poisoned and deluded her dawning reason.  Soon after these protestations of love were made, the young lady fell into a fever, which was like to prove fatal to her life.

The lover and her sister never quitted the chamber for sixteen nights, nor took any other repose than throwing themselves alternately upon a little pallet in the same room.  Having in her nature a great deal of gratitude, and a very tender sense of benefits; she promised upon her recovery to marry her guardian, which as soon as her health was sufficiently restored, she performed in the presence of a maid servant, her sister, and a gentleman who had married a relation.  In a word, she was married, possessed, and ruin’d.

The husband of our poetess brought her to London, fixed her in a remote quarter of it, forbad her to stir out of doors, or to receive the visits of her sister, or any other relations, friends, or acquaintance.  This usage, she thought exceeding barbarous, and it grieved her the more excessively, since she married him only because she imagined he loved and doated on her to distraction; for as his person was but ordinary, and his age disproportioned, being twenty-years older than she, it could not be imagined that she was in love with him.—­She was very uneasy at being kept a prisoner; but her husband’s fondness and jealousy was made the pretence.  She always loved reading, to which she was now more than ever obliged, as so much time lay upon her hands:  Soon after she proved with child, and so perpetually ill, that she implored her husband to let her enjoy the company of her sister and friends.  When he could have no relief from her importunity (being assured