on this account she was
seeking to break the engagement. She said, that, from that moment, her
sympathies were aroused for him, to soothe the remorse and anguish which
seemed preying on his mind, and which she then regarded as the
sensibility of an unusually exacting moral nature, which judged itself by
higher standards, and condemned itself unsparingly for what most young
men of his times regarded as venial faults. She had every hope for his
future, and all the enthusiasm of belief that so many men and women of
those times and ours have had in his intrinsic nobleness. She said the
gloom, however, seemed to be even deeper when he came to the marriage;
but she looked at it as the suffering of a peculiar being, to whom she
was called to minister. I said to her, that, even in the days of my
childhood, I had heard of something very painful that had passed as they
were in the carriage, immediately after marriage. She then said that it
was so; that almost his first words, when they were alone, were, that she
might once have saved him; that, if she had accepted him when he first
offered, she might have made him anything she pleased; but that, as it
was, she would find she had married a devil.

The conversation, as recorded in Lady Anne Barnard's Diary, seems only a
continuation of the foregoing, and just what might have followed upon it.

I then asked how she became certain of the true cause.

She said, that, from the outset of their married life, his conduct
towards her was strange and unaccountable, even during the first weeks
after the wedding, while they were visiting her friends, and outwardly on
good terms. He seemed resolved to shake and combat both her religious
principles and her views of the family state. He tried to undermine her
faith in Christianity as a rule of life by argument and by ridicule. He
set before her the Continental idea of the liberty of marriage; it being
a simple partnership of friendship and property, the parties to which
were allowed by one another to pursue their own separate individual
tastes. He told her, that, as he could not be expected to confine
himself to her, neither should he expect or wish that she should confine
herself to him; that she was young and pretty, and could have her lovers,
and he should never object; and that she must allow him the same freedom.

She said that she did not comprehend to what this was tending till after
they came to London, and his sister came to