N° 65. SATURDAY, APRIL 29, 1786.

Malignitati falsa species Libertatis inest.

SIR,

To the AUTHOR of the LOUNGER.

TAC.

SOME time ago a female correspondent was obliged to enter a complaint with you against one of the Virtues, and set forth the hardships which a family endures from the circumstances of its master's extreme cultivation of Truth. I am sorry, Sir, to be obliged to enter a similar complaint against another of the Virtues, of the same family with that of which the Lady complains; and to relate to you the effects which I happened lately to witness from the extreme cultivation of Freedom.

The word Freedom, Sir, till this late incident in my life, carried with it a sound at once so sacred and so animating, as I thought was entitled to my warmest love and veneration. Yet a young man, and full of the classic remembrances of Roman virtue, I connected with the love of Liberty every thing that dignifies and humanizes man; and I heard the cautions of some of my elder and more experienced acquaintance with the secret triumph of a superior mind, whose vigour was unsubdued by age, whose honest warmth was unextinguished by interest or the world.

By one of those advisers I was lately carried on a visit to the house of a common relation of ours, with whose person, as he resided in a different part of the

country, I was not at all acquainted; but whose character, having often heard him celebrated as a warm partisan of Liberty, I had long learned to revere; and I was happy to find that I should have now an opportunity of acquiring an intimate acquaintance with him, our visit being proposed to be as long as it was distant, and meant to last during the whole Easter Holidays, according to their longest computation.

When we arrived at the house, and I was introduced to my cousin, I was somewhat disappointed with his aspect and manner, neither of which possessed a great deal of that dignity which, from an assertor of Freedom, according to my classic notions of the character, I had taught myself to expect. I found Mr. Wilfull a thick squat figure, with an appearance of great strength and freshness for his age, with a person rather lusty, and somewhat of rubicundity in his face. His motions were more quick than graceful, his voice rough and strong, which last, however, I was inclined, on the first hearing it, to call firm and manly. These qualities I afterwards found employed to give force and emphasis to a variety of oaths, of which the gentleman was very profuse in the course of his conversation. He gave us a very cordial welcome, and insisted on our recruiting ourselves after our journey with a glass of his cordial waters, which I found so strong as to make my eyes water the first mouthful I swallowed; but Mr. Wilfull himself took off a bumper, without seeming to feel any such inconvenience.

When dinner came, the ladies of the family appeared, who consisted of Mrs. Wilfull and two daughters, on whom our landlord bestowed a hearty scold for making us wait, as he said, a quarter of an hour for their damned hair-dressing. This reprimand the ladies bore with great submission. Mrs. Wilfull, indeed,

made a silent sort of reply, by pulling out her watch, by which I saw it wanted several minutes of four. But Mr. Wilfull swore another oath, that a woman's watch was like her judgment, very little to be depended on; and desired her to take notice, that his watch was to be the only regulator in his house.

During the time of dinner, Mr. Wilfull made use of the same sort of freedom to criticise several dishes which were not quite dressed to his liking. On his lady making some attempts at explanation and apology, he told her he knew she must always have her own way, but that he could not help believing his own smell and taste: on some further remonstrance, though a very gentle one, he carried the liberty of his tongue a little farther; he swore at her and cursed the cook.

The cloth had not been removed above a few minutes, when our landlord, by asking the ladies toasts one after another as fast as they could be drank, gave them a hint that he expected they should retire, and leave us to enjoy that liberty he loved.' As the first fruits of which, the door was scarce shut behind them, when he began to give us some toasts which' seemed to have been at his tongue's end all the time they staid, and waited there impatient for utterance' till they should be gone. At the close of these moral sentiments, he gave us some political sentiments, (for Mr. Wilfull is extremely sentimental,) which tended to fix the creed of the company in patriotism, as the former set of healths had established their principles in point of virtue and morality. The first of these, Liberty and the constitution,' we were desired to drink, not in the ordinary glasses of the table, but in an old-fashioned rummer of a particular shape and magnitude, which had been in his family for several generations, and was marked with certain words and figures more emblematical of freedom than

of taste or politeness. This dose of wine it was absolutely incumbent on every guest to swallow at a draught; on somebody's venturing to remonstrate, that his making himself sick would tend neither to the increase of liberty, nor to the establishment of the constitution, his plea was immediately over-ruled in a very vociferous manner by our host, from whose decision I found there was no appeal. He contrived to furnish us with such a variety of bumper-toasts in favour of freedom, which none of us were at liberty to decline, that I was carried speechless to bed, (as, I was afterwards told, were several other members of the company) and waked next morning with so violent a head-ach, that had I nor been informed of Mr. Wilfull's being that day engaged at a county-meeting on some public measure, I believe I should have hardly been prevailed on to rise.

When he took his departure after breakfast, which he did with some apologies, extremely unnecessary, for leaving us with his wife, I was very agreeably disappointed to find Mrs. Wilfull and the young ladies not at all so much given to silence as from their deportment on the preceding day I had been led to imagine them. I found the one had learned and the other inherited some of Mr. Wilfull's love of liberty, which they were exceedingly fond of exercising in the absence of that gentleman, and which shewed itself in a very free discussion of his temper, disposition, and management of his family. In the course of this conversation, in which indeed I was a hearer only, I learned that Mr. Wilfull was perfectly the lord and master of his own house, in which he exercised the most dictatorial sway, no doubt according to the old Roman maxim, 'Ne quid detrimenti Respublica capiat,' for the pure good of the family. Of this, however, the family, as perhaps was sometimes the case with the state, were not quite so sensible as

they should have been. Mrs. Wilfull complained that her husband was a little particular in his temper.The daughters talked more plainly, and said that Papa was one of the strangest out-of-the-wayest men in the world; that he would not allow them education like other girls in town, because, he said, in a town they would learn nothing but French dances and French fashions, both which he hated, because the French were slaves. His son, it seems, he also kept at home with a tutor he had provided for him, who was but very little of a scholar his scholarship, Mrs. Wilfull said, her husband did not much mind, as he had never found Greek or Latin of any use to himself; but that this young man was a favourite with him because of his staunch political principles, and being what he called a strong-headed fellow-but in what sense the word was applied Mrs. Wilfull did not explain. She added, that neither her son or daughters had much opportunity of improvement from society, as political quarrels had estranged the principal families in the neighbourhood from their house.

In domestic matters Mrs. Wilfull hinted the diffi culties she frequently laboured under to keep things tolerably quiet. The servants, she said, were frequently leaving them at short warnings; and that they had several law-suits with discarded footmen about wages and board wages. Mr. Wilfull, she

said, was in the main a very good sort of man; but it must be confessed he liked his own way in every thing; and that he would not allow any body the liberty of giving him an answer.

From the parson of Mr. Wilfull's parish, who happened to come in during this conversation, I learned that his patron's tenants had all very short leases, as it was his principle, that a man's estate was not his own, if a low fellow had the use of it for