University of Virginia Library

The famous Fleet Prison in London for centuries had been a general receptacle for debtors. In the eighteenth century it had become a scene of the worst forms of brutality, and even vice, in consequence of the extortions exacted by keepers, but primarily chargeable to a system by which wardens were able to underlet privileges.

If there be a hero in "Charlotte Temple" and "Lucy Temple," it is Blakeney, and yet this is the last that the reader sees of him. There is something fine in a romance which makes of the man who thus brought together Henry Temple and Lucy Eldridge, the benefactor, a quarter of a century afterward, of the daughter of their unfortunate child, Charlotte. The reader wishes to know more of him. We must find in the absence of further information new evidence of the fidelity with which the author conformed her narrative to events that had actually taken place.

These lines seem to be original with Mrs. Rowson.

The word "old" in this paragraph does not appear in late editions. It now restored to its place from the original American text. When Mrs. Rowson was writing her story, the living Earl of Derby had held the title about thirteen years, and was then thirty seven years old. The "old Earl" was his grandfather, Edward Stanley, who had held the title forty-two years, and died in 1776, at the age of eighty-seven. One of the "old Earl's" daughters, named Charlotte, was the wife of General Burgoyne, of the Revolution. The Charlotte Stanley who is believed to have been buried in Trinity churchyard appears, therefore, to have borne the name of her father's sister. See Burke's "Peerage."

Colonel James G. Montrésor, the father of Colonel John Montrésor, was thrice married, first to John's mother, Mary Haswell. There were several sons by the first marriage, including, besides John, James, who was a lieutenant in the Navy, and Henry, who also followed a military or naval career.

Chichester lies distant from Portsmouth seventeen and one half miles. Portsmouth then as now was the chief naval arsenal of England, its fortifications being the most important in Great Britain. Its harbor lies close to Spithead, where 1,000 ships of the line, sheltered by the Isle of Wight, could safely ride, Here, in 1782 was lost the Royal George, of 108 guns, with nearly thousand men on board—a disaster now remembered mainly because it was the subject of Cowper's familiar poem beginning

The war preparations here indicated were those which followed the Boston Tea Party of December, 1773. General Gage, having been sent to Boston as Governor of Massachusetts and the Port Bill having been passed by Parliament, reinforcements were dispatched to America in support of vigorous measure against the rebellious colonists.