Marmaduke Herbert Author:Marguerite Blessington Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: letters to me declared had secured his happiness. That was his affair, and not mine, so I never exposed to him, as some meddling fools would have done, how much ... more »wiser a choice he might have made in wedding a country-woman of his own, with a good fortune and family connexions, that might have forwarded his interests in the world. The same want of perception and credulity which induced him to believe me endowed with all his own peculiar qualities, no doubt, led him to think that his wife was a paragon of perfection." I drew up my head offended, and was about to pronounce an eulogium on my poor mother, when he cut me short, by adding— "I don't want to say anything against either of your parents; I only have come to the conclusion, that as his friendship for me made your father give me credit for the possession of peculiarities the most opposite to my character, and congenial to his own, so may his mad passion for his wife have induced an equally false appreciation of hers. One thing is quite certain, which is, that this extravagant passion of his for her renders his death an insupportable calamity to its object, to whom life is now an unbearable burthen; whereas, had her husband been a cool, calculating, reasonable man, he would not have been blind to those manifold defects from which no woman is exempt; he would have endeavoured to correct them, and, when he died, his widow would have found consolation by the reflection, that if she had lost a husband, she had likewise lost a Mentor, whose strictures, however just, were never palateable." Such were the observations addressed by my guardian to me. It was plain he had not been used to children, or he would have selected topics more suited to my comprehension. How, at this time, I remember his words, surprises me, as much as i...« less