It is not a question of marriage on three hundred a year without prospects, but a marriage on five or six hundred a year with good expectations. In the Inns of Court there are, at the present time, scores of clever, industrious fine-hearted gentlemen who have sure incomes of three or four hundred pounds per annum. In Tyburnia and Kensington there is an equal number of young gentlewomen with incomes varying between £150 and £300 a year. These men and women see each other at balls and dinners, in the parks and at theatres; the ladies would not dislike to be wives, the men are longing to be husbands. But that hideous tyrant, social opinion, bids them avoid marriage.
In Lord Eldon's time the case was otherwise. Society saw nothing singular or reprehensible in his conduct when he brought Bessie to live in the little house in Cursitor Street. No one sneered at the young law-student, whose home was a little den in a dingy thoroughfare. At a later date, the rising junior, whose wife lived over his business chambers in Carey Street, was the object of no unkind criticism because his domestic arrangements were inexpensive, and almost frugal. Had his success been tardy instead of quick and decisive, and had circumstances compelled him to live under the shadow of Lincoln's Inn wall for thirty years on a narrow income, he would not on that account have suffered from a single disparaging criticism. Amongst his neighbors in adjacent streets, and within the boundaries of his Inn, he would have found society for himself and wife, and playmates for his children. Good fortune coming in full strong flood, he was not compelled to greatly change his plan of existence. Even in those days, when costly ostentation characterized aristocratic society--he was permitted to live modestly--and lay the foundation of that great property which he transmitted to his ennobled descendants.
When satire has done its worst with the miserly propensities of the great lawyer and his wife, their long familiar intercourse exhibits a wealth of fine human affection and genuine poetry which sarcasm cannot touch. Often as he had occasion to regret Lady Eldon's peculiarities--the stinginess which made her grudge the money paid for a fish or a basket of fruit; the nervous repugnance to society, which greatly diminished his popularity; and the taste for solitude and silence which marked her painfully towards the close of her life--the Chancellor never even hinted to her his dissatisfaction. When their eldest daughter, following her mother's example, married without the permission of her parents, it was suggested to Lord Eldon that her ladyship ought to take better care of her younger daughter, Lady Frances, and entering society should play the part of a vigilant _chaperon_. The counsel was judicious; but the Chancellor declined to act upon it, saying,--"When she was young and beautiful, she gave up everything for me. What she is, I have made her; and I cannot now bring myself to compel her inclinations. Our marriage prevented her mixing in society when it afforded her pleasure; it appears to give pain now, and why should I interpose?" In his old age, when she was dead, he visited his estate in Durham, but could not find heart to cross the Tyne bridge and look at the old house from which he took her in the bloom and tenderness of her girlhood. An urgent invitation to visit Newcastle drew from him the reply--"I know my fellow-townsmen complain of my not coming to see them; but _how can I pass that bridge?_" After a pause, he added, "Poor Bessie! if ever there was an angel on earth she was one. The only reparation which one man can make to another for running away with his daughter, is to be exemplary in his conduct towards her."