LADY Eleanor Dudley married, at a very early period of her youth, a rich, but private gentleman, of the name of Fitz-osborne. He was of a noble family; but the title of his ancient house was so far remote from himself, that it appeared very improbable he should outlive those generations on whom it must first devolve. However, his respectable connexions and apparent large fortune, gained him the / easy consent of Lady Eleanor's friends, to his marriage with her.

He proved to be an husband who loved the pleasures of the chace and the bottle more than the company and conversation of his blooming bride; who felt but little affection for one, whom she had been rather compelled to promise obedience and honour to, than to her own concurring sentiments of regard and esteem.

She was lovely in her person, but her mind was not very highly cultivated. Her reading was confined, like that of too many females, in that rude age, to the study of legendary tales and knight errant love; which absorbed her ideas in a superstitious system, that / taught her to imagine herself the passive object of an over-ruling fate, which had not yet destined her to behold the man she was really to love. When that epocha of her life should arrive, the diviners and professors of witchcraft, with which that credulous age abounded, assured her she would be devoted to him for ever, and he to her, with the most enthusiastic and increased fondness. Her young mind was, in that state, easily warped; but as easily moulded to excellent principles, had her husband stayed more at home with her, attended her more when she went abroad, and not have left her continually, as he did, to solitude and to the indulgence of leisure hours to cherish her favourite system, which taught her, although she was / married, it being to a man she rather disliked, there was yet a lover in store for her, to render her present blank and uncomfortable life a scene of pleasure and delight.