It was a sonnet, and indeed one of her own writing, that brought about her acquaintance with Mr. Hutchinson.  The sonnet was read to him, and discussed amongst his friends, with guesses at the authorship; for a young woman did not, in that world, write a sonnet without a feint of hiding its origin.  One gentleman believed a woman had made it.  Another said, if so, there were but two women capable of making it; but he owned, later, that he said “two” out of civility (very good civility of a kind that is not now practised) to a lady who chanced to be present; but that he knew well there was but one; and he named her.  From her future husband Lucy Apsley received that praise of exceptions wherewith women are now, and always will be, praised:  “Mr. Hutchinson,” she says, “fancying something of rationality in the sonnet beyond the customary reach of a she-wit, could scarcely believe it was a woman’s.”

He sought her acquaintance, and they were married.  Her treasured conscience did not prevent her from noting the jealousy of her young friends.  A generous mind, perhaps, would rather itself suffer jealousy than be quick in suspecting, or complacent in causing, or precise in setting it down.  But Mrs. Hutchinson doubtless offered up the envy of her companions in homage to her Puritan lover’s splendour.  His austerity did not hinder him from wearing his “fine, thick-set head of hair” in long locks that were an offence to many of his own sect, but, she says, “a great ornament to him.”  But for herself she has some dissimulated vanities.  She was negligent of dress, and when, after much waiting and many devices, her suitor first saw her, she was “not ugly in a careless riding-habit.”  As for him, “in spite of all her indifference, she was surprised (she writes) with some unusual liking in her soul when she saw this gentleman, who had hair, eyes, shape, and countenance enough to beget love in any one.”  He married her as soon as she could leave her chamber, when she was so deformed by small-pox that “the priest and all that saw her were affrighted to look at her; but God recompensed his justice and constancy by restoring her.”

The following are some of the admirable sentences that prove Lucy Hutchinson a woman of letters in a far more serious sense than our own time uses.  One phrase has a Stevenson-like character, a kind of gesture of language; this is where she praises her husband’s “handsome management of love.” {1} She thus prefaces her description of her honoured lord:  “If my treacherous memory have not lost the dearest treasure that ever I committed to its trust—.”  She boasts of her country in lofty phrase:  “God hath, as it were, enclosed a people here, out of the waste common of the world.”  And again of her husband:  “It will be as hard to say which was the predominant virtue in him as which is so in its own nature.”  “He had made up his accounts with life and death, and fixed his purpose to entertain both honourably.”  “The heat of his youth a little inclined him to the passion of anger, and the goodness of his nature to those of love and grief; but reason was never dethroned by them, but continued governor and moderator of his soul.”