ater period, when his satires had stirred up a
nest of hornets, the poet was in the habit of carrying pistols, and
taking a large dog for his companion when walking out at Twickenham.

Weddings within the liberties of the Fleet by sham clergymen, or
clergymen confined for debt, were the source of numberless evils. Every
kind of deception was practised, and the victims once in the clutches of
their reverend captors had to pay heavily for the illegal ceremony.
Ladies were trepanned into matrimony, and Smollett in his _History_
observes, that the Fleet parsons encouraged every kind of villainy. It
is astonishing that so great an evil in the heart of London should have
been allowed to exist so long, and it was not until the Marriage Act of
Lord Hardwicke in 1753, which required the publication of banns, that
the Fleet marriages ceased. On the day before the Act came into
operation three hundred marriages are said to have taken place.[4]

Marriages of a more lawful kind were generally conducted on business
principles. Young women were expected to accept the husband selected for
them by their parents or guardians, and the main object considered was
to gain a good settlement. It was for this that Mary Granville, who is
better known as Mrs. Delany, was sacrificed at seventeen to a gouty old
man of sixty, and when he died she was expected to marry again with the
same object in view. Mrs. Delany detested, with good cause, the
commercial estimate of matrimony. Writing, in 1739, to Lady
Throckmorton, she says, 'Miss Campbell is to be married to-morrow to my
Lord Bruce. Her father can give her no fortune; she is very pretty,
modest, well-behaved, and just eighteen, has two thousand a year
jointure, and four hundred pin-money; _they say_ he is cross, covetous,
and threescore years old, and this unsuitable match is the _admiration
of the old and the envy of the young_! For my part I _pity her_, for if
she has any notion of social pleasures that arise from true esteem and
sensible conversation, how miserable must she be.'[5]

Girls dowered with beauty or with fortune were not always suffered to
marry in this humdrum fashion. Abduction was by no means an imaginary
peril. Mrs. Delany tells the story of a lady in Ireland, from whom she
received the relation, who was entrapped in her uncle's house, carried
off by four men in masks, and treated in the most brutal manner. And in
1711 the Duke of Newcastle, having become acquainted with a de