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Whether this had connection with the misfortune which after- 

 wards befel the " Beauty of Buttermere," is not easy to decide ; 

 but the little inn was sometime afterwards visited by a scoundrel 

 who assumed the name of the Hon. Colonel Hope, and represented 

 himself to be the next brother to the Earl of Hopetoun, and, to 

 make a long story short, he made love to the village beauty and in 

 a short time married her. The account of the marriage found its 

 way into all the newspapers, and brought to light the fact that the 

 real Colonel Hope had been abroad the whole summer, and that 

 the impostor who had heartlessly deceived poor Mary was an 

 unmitigated villain named John Hatfield, who had previously 

 deserted one wife — by whom he had three children — had after- 

 wards been married to another (his first wife being still living), 

 whom he also deserted, leaving her with two infant children. A 

 short time after his marriage with Mary he discovered that the 

 oflficers of the law were on his track, and left the village with the 

 idea of escaping justice. After being tracked from place to place 

 he was apprehended near Swansea and committed to Brecon Gaol. 

 He was afterwards taken to London, and examined before the 

 magistrates, where charges of forgery and bigamy were brought 

 against him. He was then committed to take his trial at the next 

 Carlisle Assizes, where he was proved guilty of various charges of 

 forgery. Capital punishment was at that time the penalty for 

 forgery, and the villain who brought ruin on the unfortunate women 

 he so cruelly deceived was ignominiously executed at Carlisle, 

 September 3rd, 1803. Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth, the lake 

 poets, to whom she was well-known — in fact all classes of society — 

 took great interest in Mary, whose conduct under her misfortunes 

 was marked throughout with propriety and good sense, and her 

 story was afterwards dramatised and acted in the London theatres. 

 Coleridge says : " In looking back upon that frightful exposure 

 of human guilt and misery, that the man who, when pursued by 

 these heart-rending apostrophes and this litany of anguish sounding 

 in his ears from despairing women and famishing children, could 

 yet find it possible to enjoy the calm pleasures of a lake tourist, 

 and deliberately hunt for the picturesque, must have been a fiend 



