As all the great ladies are mortal this year, my family is forced to recruit the peerage.  My brother’s last daughter is married; and, as Biddy Tipkin(110) says, though their story is too short for a romance, it will make a very pretty novel—­nay, it is almost brief enough for a play, and very near comes within one of the unities, the space of four-and-twenty hours.  There is in the world, particularly in my world, for he lives directly over against me across the water, a strange brute called Earl of Dysart.(111) Don’t be frightened, it is not he.  His son, Lord Huntingtower, to whom he gives but four hundred pounds a year, is a comely young gentleman of twenty-six, who has often had thoughts of trying whether his father would not like grandchildren better than his own children, as sometimes people have more grand-tenderness than paternal.  All the answer he could ever get was, that the Earl could not afford, as he has five younger children, to make any settlement, but he offered, as a proof of his inability and kindness, to lend his son a large sum of money at low interest.  This indigent usurer has thirteen thousand pounds a year, and sixty thousand pounds in the funds.  The money and ten of the thirteen thousand in land are entailed on Lord Huntingtower.  The young lord, it seems, has been in love with Charlotte for some months, but thought so little of inflaming her, that yesterday fortnight she did not know him by sight.  On that day he came and proposed himself to my brother, who with much surprise heard his story, but excused himself from giving an answer.  He said, he would never force the inclinations of his children; he did not believe his daughter had any engagement or attachment, but she might have:  he would send for her and know her mind.  She was at her sister Waldegrave’s, to whom, on receiving the notification, she said very sensibly, “if I was but nineteen, I would refuse pointblank; I do not like to be married in a week to a man I never saw.  But I am two-and-twenty; some people say I am handsome, some say I am not; I believe the truth is, I am likely to be at large and to go off soon-it is dangerous to refuse so great a match.”  Take notice of the married in a week; the love that was so many months in ripening, could not stay above a week.  She came and saw this impetuous lover, and I believe was glad she had not refused pointblank-for they were married last Thursday.  I tremble a little for the poor girl; not to mention the oddness of the father, and twenty disagreeable things that may be in the young man, who has been kept and lived entirely out of the world; @ takes her fortune, ten thousand pounds, and cannot settle another shilling upon her till his father dies, and then promises Only a thousand a year.  Would one venture one’s happiness and one’s whole fortune for the chance of being Lady Dysart?@if Lord Huntingtower dies before his father, she will not have sixpence.  Sure my brother has risked too much!