anguage of romance
is called in love with Mr. Fletcher, but I was deeply and tenderly
attached to him. He had inspired a confidence and regard I had never
felt for any other man. I could not bear the thought of marrying in
opposition to my father's will, but I was resolved _on principle_
never to marry so long as Mr. Fletcher remained single." He was twenty
years her senior, without fortune, and hindered, instead of aided, in
his struggle at the Scottish bar by his prominence as an advocate of
reform. These, she admits, were "sound and rational objections,"
and could she have prevailed on Mr. Fletcher to release her from the
engagement, this solution, she confesses, would have been less painful
to her than offending her father. But her lover remaining firm, she
decided after two years, having come of age in the interval, to take
the step dictated by honor as well as inclination, and which the event
proved to have been, as she anticipated, "best for the interest and
happiness of all parties."

Her married life lasted thirty-seven years, and she survived her
husband nearly thirty more, dying in 1858 at the age of eighty-seven.
Her career was, on the whole, one of singular happiness and
prosperity, made so in part by fortunate circumstances, but in a still
greater degree by her sunny temperament, her power of attracting and
retaining friends, her unflagging interest in public affairs and her
unshaken belief in human progress. Jeffrey and Brougham were among her
earliest friends, Carlyle and Mazzini among her latest, and there have
been few Englishmen of note in the present century whose names do not
appear in the list. Unfortunately, they appear for the most part as
names only. They occur incidentally in a record intended not for
the public, but for the writer's own family, whose interest in her
personal history needed no stimulant and called for no extraneous
details. Here and there we find a passage calculated to whet if not
to satisfy a more general curiosity, such as the account of a
conversation with Wordsworth after his return from Italy in 1837,
and some letters from Mazzini written soon after his first arrival in
England, But even these belong not to the memoir itself, but to the
editor's additions. The book is therefore not to be judged by a mere
literary standard, or read with expectations founded on a general
knowlege of the writer's position and associations. On all with
whom she came in contact Mrs. Fletcher