The most entertaining, fascinating, witty and brilliant of her sex; learned, accomplished, graceful and beautiful, the irresistible Lady Mary Pierrepont gave from her earliest years promise of what she afterwards became. At eight years old she was a toast, and the fame of her beauty and talents spread from that time, every fresh year adding to her attractions, and luring new admirers, until the crowd of those who followed in her train filled every country through which she passed. She was the very impersonation of all the beauties and enslavers which poets and romancers feign: she might have sat for the portrait of the most finished fine lady, the most enchanting coquette; and she probably, in effect, supplied many a writer with such a heroine as was the fashion of her day.

Yet, with admirers innumerable, and all appliances and means to boot that should have enabled her to make a happy marriage, the charming Lady Mary was unhappy in the choice she made. She possessed so many useful virtues, had so much philanthropy and feeling, that it is impossible but that she would have made a good wife, even in spite of the danger she had run of being spoilt by indulgence and adulation, if she had met with a man of suitable mind, who could have appreciated her good qualities; but Mr. Wortley was a cold, severe, unimaginative person, who, marrying her, a youthful beauty and coquette, should have known how, judiciously, to correct her errors, and brought forth the excellences which existed in her mind; instead of treating her with the sullen neglect to which, from an early period of her marriage, he condemned her.