Read it through once

“She, full of confiding love, refused every settlement beyond two hundred a year pin-money, out of his own property, on which he insisted”—words written by Mary Russell Mitford, many years after, and which would contradict our statement of her father’s pecuniary embarrassment, were they not discounted by the words of the Rev. William Harness, who, writing on the matter to a friend, says: “I hear that when Mitford was engaged to his wife she had a set of shirts made for him, lest it should be said that ‘she had married a man without a shirt to his back!’ Of course the story is not true; but it expressed what folk thought of his deplorable poverty and the impossibility of his making that settlement on her, for which my father was trustee, out of funds of his own, as Miss Mitford suggests.”