Bishop Burnet, from absence of mind, had drawn as strong a picture of herself to the Duchess of Marlborough, as Pope did under covert of another lady.  Dining with the Duchess after the Duke’s disgrace, Burnet was comparing him to Belisarius:  “But how,” said she, “could so great a general be so abandoned?” “Oh!  Madam,” said the Bishop, “do not you know what a brimstone of a wife he had’!”

Perhaps you know this anecdote, and perhaps several others that I have been relating.  No matter; they will go under the article of my dotage-and very properly-I began with tales of my nursery, and prove that I have been writing in my second childhood.

H. W. January 13th, 1789.

(121) The Lady Henrietta, married to Lord Godolphin, who, by act of Parliament, succeeded as Duchess of Marlborough.  She died in 1738, childless; and the issue of her next sister, Lady Sunderland, succeeded to the duchy of Marlborough.-E.

(122) “For reasons,” says Dr. Johnson, “either not known, or not mentioned, Congreve bequeathed a legacy of about ten thousand pounds to the Duchess; the accumulation of attentive parsimony, which, though to her superfluous and useless, might have given great assistance to the ancient family from which he descended, at that time, by the imprudence of his relation, reduced to difficulties and distress."-E.

(123) Lady Sunderland was a great politician; and having, like her mother, a most beautiful head of hair, used, while combing it at her toilet, to receive men whose votes or interests she wished to influence.

(124) She had an elder son, who died young, while only Earl of Sunderland.  He had parts, and all the ambition of his parents and of his family (which his younger brother had not); but George ii. had conceived such an aversion to his father, that he would not employ him.  The young Earl at last asked Sir Robert Walpole for an ensigncy in the Guards.  The minister, astonished at so humble a request from a man of such consequence, expressed his surprise.  “I ask it,” said the young lord, “to ascertain whether it is determined that I shall never have any thing.”  He died soon after at Paris.

(125) By Catherine Sedley, created by her royal lover Countess of Dorchester for life.-E.

(126) Lady Dorchester is well known for her wit, and for saying that she wondered for what James chose his mistresses:  “We are none of us handsome,” said she; “and if we have wit, he has not enough to find it out.”  But I do not know whether it is as public, that her style was gross and shameless.  Meeting the Duchess of Portsmouth and Lady Orkney, the favourite of King William, at the drawing-room of George the First, “God!” said she, “who would have thought that we three whores should have met here?” Having, after the King’s abdication, married Sir David Collyer, by whom she had two sons, she said to them, " If any body should call you sons of a whore, you must bear it; for you are so:  but if they call you bastards, fight till you die; for you are an honest man’s sons.”  Susan, Lady Bellasis, another of King James’s mistresses, had wit too, and no beauty.  Mrs. Godfrey had neither.  Grammont has recorded why she was chosen.