nerally exaggerated. From Mrs. Easy I have received a letter denying more than half of her husband's assertions. My correspondent Alcander's relation on the other side of the question, meets with perfect credit from me. I myself know several couples as happy as his Euphanor and Almeria; it is probably owing to the truth of its recital, that his letter seems to me not so well calculated for the entertainment of my readers, as those which perhaps borrow a little from fiction, to furnish out their distresses. The epistles of to-day, in particular, I have taken the liberty to read to some of the most creditable of my married acquaintance, who are unanimous in declaring the distress of which they complain to be perfectly out of nature.

É V

N° 75. SATURDAY, JULY 8, 1786.

E' troppo barbara quella legge, che vuol disporre del cuor delle donne a costo della loro rovina.

GOLDONI.

SIR,

To the AUTHOR of the LOUNGER.

Avignon, May, 1786. You will perhaps be surprised at receiving a letter from this place; but if you possess that benevolence which from your writings one is led to ascribe to you, the unfortunate from any quarter may claim some of your notice. My story, I believe, will not be with. out its use; and if you knew that sort of melencholy

indulgence which I feel in addressing a letter to my native country!-But I will not give way to feeling; I mean simply to relate; and situated as I am, banished from the world, and lost to myself, I can tell my story,—I think I can,— -as that of a third person, in which, though I may be interested, I will yet be impartial.

My father possessed a small patrimonial estate in the county of and married, in early life, a lady whose birth was much above her fortune, and who unluckily retained all the pride of the first, though it but ill suited the circumstances of the latter. The consequences were such as might naturally be looked for. My father was involved in an expensive style of life, which in a few years obliged him to sell his estate for payment of his debts. He did not live to feel the distresses to which he might have been reduced; and after his death my mother took up her residence in a country-town, where the pittance that remained from the reversion of my father's effects, assisted by a small pension from government, which a distant relation of my mother's procured for us, enabled her to educate me on that sober plan which necessity had now taught her to adopt.

Our situation, however, still allowed her to mix something of the genteel in my education; and the place in which we lived was inhabited by several families, who, like us, had retired from more public and expensive life, and still retained somewhat of that polish which former intercourse with the fashionable world had conferred. At the age of seventeen, therefore, I was, I believe, tolerably accomplished; and though I knew nothing of high life, nor indeed wished to know it, yet I possessed a degree of refinement and breeding rather above what the circumstances of my mother might have been expected to

Of my beauty, I was, like other girls, somewhat vain; but my mother was proud to an extreme degree. She looked upon it as a gift by which my fortune and hers were to be made, and consequently spared no possible pains to set it off to advantage. Its importance and its power were often inculcated on me; and my ambition was daily inflamed by the recital of the wealth and station which other girls had acquired by marriages to which their beauty alone had entitled them. I think I heard those instances with more indifference than my mother wished I should; and could not easily be brought to consider all happiness as centered in riches or in rank, to which her wishes and hopes were constantly pointed.

These hopes, however, accident put it in her power to accomplish. At the house of one of the genteelest of our acquaintance (who had two daughters nearly of my age) we met with Mr. M, a gentleman whom the lady of the house introduced particularly to us, as a man of great fortune and singular worth. Mr. Mwas past the meridian of life; he had the look and air of a man who had seen the world, and talked on most subjects with a degree of shrewd and often sarcastic observation, which met with much applause from the older part of the company, but which was not at all calculated to please the younger. The enthusiasm of attachment, of feeling, and of virtue, which our reading sometimes induced us to mention, he ridiculed as existing only in the dreams of poetry, or the fanciful heroes of romance; but which sense or experience neither looked to find in others, nor ventured to indulge in ourselves. In short, my companions and I hated and feared him; and neither our aversion nor our fear was at all removed by the lectures of our mothers on his good sense and agreeable manners.

These lectures were at last bestowed with particular emphasis on me, and after a day or two's preamble of general commendations, he was formally proposed to me by my mother, as a husband. He himself, though he made his court chiefly to her, was now pretty sedulous in his attentions to me; and made many speeches to my beauty, and protestations of his love, which I heard with little emotion, but which my mother, and her friend, whose guests we were, represented as the genuine expressions of the most sincere and ardent attachment. Of love I had formed such ideas as girls of my age generally do; and though I had no particular preference for any one else, I did not hesitate in refusing him, for whom I had hitherto conceived nothing but disgust. My refusal increased the ardour of my lover in his suit to me he talked in common-place language of the anguish it caused him; to my mother he spoke in the language of the world, and increased his offers in point of settlement to an exhorbitant degree. Her influence was proportionally exerted. She persuaded, implored, and was angry. The luxury and happiness of that state which I might acquire were warmly painted; the folly, the impiety, of depriving myself and her of so comfortable an establishment, was strongly held forth; the good qualities and nerosity of Mr. M— were expatiated on; those ideas which I ventured to plead as reasons for my rejection were ridiculed and exploded.At my time of life, unused to resistance, fond of my mother, and accustomed to be guided by her! perhaps, too, somewhat dazzled with the prospect of the situation which this marriage would open to me! it is not surprising that my first resolutions were overcome. I became the wife of Mr. M

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For some time the happiness they had promised

my

if not tender in his attachment; my wishes for self were not only indulged, but prompted; and his kindness to my mother and my friends was unbounded. I was grateful to Mr. M—; I regarded I esteemed, I wished to love him. On the birth of a son, which happened about a year after our mar. riage, he redoubled his assiduities about me. I was more happy, more grateful; I looked on my boy, his father caressed him: and then it was that I loved Mr. M indeed.

This happiness, however, it was not my good for tune long to enjoy. Some projects of political ambition, in which Mr. —was engaged, called him from those domestic enjoyments which seemed for a while to have interested him, into a more public life. We took up our residence in the capital, and Mr. M- introduced me to what is called the best company. Of his own society I soon came to enjoy but little. His attachment for me began visibly to decay, and by degrees he lost altogether the attentions which for a while outlived it. Sullen and silent when we were alone, and either neglectful or contemptuous when we had company, he treated me as one whom it would have degraded him to love or to respect; whom it was scarce worth while to hate or to despise. I was considered as merely a part of his establishment; and it was my duty to do the hopours of his table, as it was that of his butler to attend to his side-board, or of his groom to take care of his horses. Like them too I was to minister to his vanity, by the splendor of my appearance; I was to shew that beauty of which he was master, in company and at public places, and was to carry the trappings with which he had adorned it, to be envied by the poor, and admired by the wealthy. While my affection for him continued, I sometimes remonstrated against this. His answers were first