the House of Commons was brief, for in the following year the peerage descended to him. In December, 1706, the higher dignity that had once been in his family was revived in his favour, and he was created Earl of Dorchester, with a special remainder, failing heirs male of his body, to his uncle Gervase Pierrepont, who had himself been raised to the peerage as Lord Pierrepont of Ardglass in Ireland and later was given the dignity of Lord Pierrepont of Hanslope in Buckinghamshire. Lord Pierrepont died in 1715, and both his titles became extinct.

The Marquess married Mary, daughter of William Feilding, third Earl of Denbigh, by his first wife, Mary, sister of John, first Baron of Kingston, in the peerage of Ireland. Lady Mary was, therefore, a relation of the novelist, Henry Fielding, whose surname was spelt differently because, he explained, his branch of the family was the only one that could spell correctly.

Of this marriage, there was issue:

(i.) William, who took the style of Viscount Newark until 1706, and then was known as Earl of Kingston until his death in 1713, at the age of twenty-one. He had married before 1711 Rachel, daughter of Thomas Baynton, of Little Charfield, Wilts, who outlived her husband eight years. There was a son, Evelyn, who succeeded to the peerage.

(ii.) Lady Mary, the subject of this memoir.

(iii.) Lady Frances, who in 1714 became the second wife of John Erskine, sixth or eleventh Earl of Mar; and

(iv.) Lady Evelyn, who married John, second Baron, and afterwards first Earl Gower, and died in June, 1727.

In the winter of 1697, when Lady Mary was eight years old, her mother died. After this, the little girl was allowed to run rather wild. Lord Kingston was very much a man about town and a gallant, and was too greatly occupied with his affairs and his parliamentary duties, which took him often from home, to concern himself about her education. In fact, before her mother's death, it would seem that Lady Mary spent months at her grandmother's, Mrs. Elizabeth Pierrepont, at her house at West Dean. When she was in her ninth year she returned to Holme Pierrepont, where, as she later complained, she was left "to the care of an old governess, who, though perfectly good and pious, wanted capacity."

Lady Mary early had a taste for books, and enjoyed to the full the library, where she no doubt read much that was good for her, and a good deal that was not. She read everything that she could lay her hands on, the old romances, poetry, and plays. One account has it that she was taught Greek and Latin by her brother's tutor; but Sir Leslie Stephen was doubtful about the Greek and inclined to the belief that she taught herself Latin. Later, certainly, she taught herself Italian, and quoted Tasso in her letters. In her studies she was encouraged by her uncle, William Feilding, and also by Bishop Burnet, of whom she said many years later: "I knew him in my very early youth, and his condescension in directing a girl in her studies is an obligation I can never forget." She had literary aspirations, and just after her twenty-first birthday she submitted to Burnet, with the following letter, a translation of "Encheiridion" of Epictetus from the Latin version. This will be found in the collected works.

"July 20, 1710.

"My Lord,

"Your hours are so well employed, I hardly dare offer you this trifle to look over; but then, so well am I acquainted with the sweetness of temper which accompanies your learning, I dare ever assure myself of a pardon. You have already forgiven me greater impertinencies, and condescended yet further in giving me instructions and bestowing some of your minutes in teaching me. This surprising humility has all the effect it ought to have on my heart; I am sensible of the gratitude I owe to so much goodness, and how much I am ever bound to be your servant. Here is the work of one week of my solitude—by the many faults in it your lordship will easily believe I spent no more time upon it; it was hardly finished when I was obliged to begin my journey, and I had not leisure to write it over again. You have it here without any corrections, with all its blots and errors: I endeavoured at no beauty of style, but to keep as literally as I could to the sense of the author. My only intention in presenting it, is to ask your lordship whether I have understood Epictetus? The fourth chapter, particularly, I am afraid I have mistaken. Piety and greatness of soul set you above all misfortunes that can happen to yourself, and the calumnies of false tongues; but that same piety which renders what happens to yourself indifferent to you, yet softens the natural compassion in your temper to the greatest degree of tenderness for the interests of the Church, and the liberty and welfare of your country: the steps that are now made towards the destruction of both, the apparent danger we are in, the manifest growth of injustice, oppression, and hypocrisy, cannot do otherwise than give your lordship those hours of sorrow, which, did not your fortitude of soul, and reflections from religion and philosophy, shorten, would add to the national misfortunes, by injuring the health of so great a supporter of our sinking liberties. I ought to ask pardon for this digression; it is more proper for me in this place to say something to excuse an address that looks so very presuming. My sex is usually forbid studies of this nature, and folly reckoned so much our proper sphere, we are sooner pardoned any excesses of that, than the least pretensions to reading or good sense. We are permitted no books but such as tend to the weakening and effeminating of the mind. Our natural defects are every way indulged, and it is looked upon as in a degree criminal to improve our reason, or fancy we have any. We are taught to place all our art in adorning our outward forms, and permitted, without reproach, to carry that custom even to extravagancy, while our minds are entirely neglected, and, by disuse of reflections, filled with nothing but the trifling objects our eyes are daily entertained with. This custom, so long established and industriously upheld, makes it even ridiculous to go out of the common road, and forces one to find as many excuses, as if it were a thing altogether criminal not to play the fool in concert with other women of quality, whose birth and leisure only serve to render them the most useless and most worthless part of the creation. There is hardly a character in the world more despicable, or more liable to universal ridicule, than that of a learned woman; those words imply, according to the received sense, a talking, impertinent, vain, and conceited creature. I believe nobody will deny that learning may have this effect, but it must be a very superficial degree of it. Erasmus was certainly a man of great learning, and good sense, and he seems to have my opinion of it, when he says Foemina qui [sic] vere sapit, non videtur sibi sapere; contra, quae cum nihil sapiat sibi videtur sapere, ea demum bis stulta est. The Abbé Bellegarde gives a right reason for women's talking overmuch: they know nothing, and every outward object strikes their imagination, and produces a multitude of thoughts, which, if they knew more, they would know not worth their thinking of. I am not now arguing for an equality of the two sexes. I do not doubt God and nature have thrown us into an inferior rank, we are a lower part of the creation, we owe obedience and submission to the superior sex, and any woman who suffers her vanity and folly to deny this, rebels against the law of the Creator, and indisputable order of nature; but there is a worse effect than this, which follows the careless education given to women of quality, its being so easy for any man of sense, that finds it either his interest or his pleasure, to corrupt them. The common method is, to begin by attacking their religion: they bring them