This incident, as was natural, made a deep impression on Temple.  He was only twenty.  Dorothy Osborne was twenty-one.  She is said to have been handsome; and there remains abundant proof that she possessed an ample share of the dexterity, the vivacity, and the tenderness of her sex.  Temple soon became, in the phrase of that time, her servant, and she returned his regard.  But difficulties, as great as ever expanded a novel to the fifth volume, opposed their wishes.  When the courtship commenced, the father of the hero was sitting in the Long Parliament; the father of the heroine was commanding in Guernsey for King Charles.  Even when the war ended, and Sir Peter Osborne returned to his seat at Chicksands, the prospects of the lovers were scarcely less gloomy.  Sir John Temple had a more advantageous alliance in view for his son.  Dorothy Osborne was in the meantime besieged by as many suitors as were drawn to Belmont by the fame of Portia.  The most distinguished on the list was Henry Cromwell.  Destitute of the capacity, the energy, the magnanimity of his illustrious father, destitute also of the meek and placid virtues of his elder brother, this young man was perhaps a more formidable rival in love than either of them would have been.  Mrs. Hutchinson, speaking the sentiments of the grave and aged, describes him as an “insolent foole,” and a “debauched ungodly cavalier.”  These expressions probably mean that he was one who, among young and dissipated people, would pass for a fine gentleman.  Dorothy was fond of dogs of larger and more formidable breed than those which lie on modern hearth-rugs; and Henry Cromwell promised that the highest functionaries at Dublin should be set to work to procure her a fine Irish greyhound.  She seems to have felt his attentions as very flattering, though his father was then only Lord-General, and not yet Protector.  Love, however, triumphed over ambition, and the young lady appears never to have regretted her decision; though, in a letter written just at the time when all England was ringing with the news of the violent dissolution of the Long Parliament, she could not refrain from reminding Temple, with pardonable vanity, “how great she might have been, if she had been so wise as to have taken hold of the offer of H. C.”

Nor was it only the influence of rivals that Temple had to dread.  The relations of his mistress regarded him with personal dislike, and spoke of him as an unprincipled adventurer, without honour or religion, ready to render service to any party for the sake of preferment.  This is, indeed, a very distorted view of Temple’s character.  Yet a character, even in the most distorted view taken of it by the most angry and prejudiced minds, generally retains something of its outline.  No caricaturist ever represented Mr. Pitt as a Falstaff, or Mr. Fox as a skeleton; nor did any libeller ever impute parsimony to Sheridan, or profusion to Marlborough.  It must be allowed that the turn of mind which the eulogists