honneur a
tous trois. Plusieurs curieux ont encore le petit livre que ce
Chancelier composa en faveur de la Polygamie." Tickled by the
extravagant credulity or grotesque malice of this declaration, an
English wit, improving upon the published words, represented the
Frenchman as maintaining that the custodian of the Great Seal of England
was called the _Lord Keeper_, because, by English law, he was permitted
to keep as many wives as he pleased.

The reader's amusement will not be diminished by a brief statement of
the facts to which we are indebted for Voltaire's assertions.

William Cowper, the first earl of his line, began life with a reputation
for dissipated tastes and habits, and by unpleasant experience he
learned how difficult it is to get rid of a bad name. The son of a
Hertfordshire baronet, he was still a law student when he formed a
reprehensible connexion with an unmarried lady of that county--Miss (or,
as she was called by the fashion of the day Mistress) Elizabeth Culling,
of Hertingfordbury Park. But little is known of this woman. Her age is
an affair of uncertainty, and all the minor circumstances of her
intrigue with young William Cowper are open to doubt and conjecture; but
the few known facts justify the inference that she neither merited nor
found much pity in her disgrace, and that William erred through boyish
indiscretion rather than from vicious propensity. She bore him two
children, and he neither married her nor was required by public opinion
to marry her. The respectability of their connexions gave the affair a
peculiar interest, and afforded countenance to many groundless reports.
By her friends it was intimated that the boy had not triumphed over the
lady's virtue until he had made her a promise of marriage; and some
persons even went so far as to assert that they were privately married.
It is not unlikely that at one time the boy intended to make her his
wife as soon as he should be independent of his father, and free to
please himself. Beyond question, however, is it that they were never
united in wedlock, and that Will Cowper joined the Home Circuit with the
tenacious fame of a scapegrace and _roue_.

That he was for any long period a man of dissolute morals is improbable;
for he was only twenty-four years of age when he was called to the bar,
and before his call he had married (after a year's wooing) a virtuous
and exemplary young lady, with whom he lived happily for more than
twenty y