laws of decency, good sense, and duty, in my own family, could have prompted me to enlarge the list of your correspondents. I am now, Sir, at my paternal estate, where I constantly reside, unless some unavoidable occurrence breaks in upon my retirement, and calls me to town. In the younger part of my days, by virtue of public employments, I was admitted to a pretty large commerce with mankind; but on my father's decease, satiated with the pleasures of high life, I withdrew in my forty-first year to the place I now write from. I am conscious of no very material imprudence that I have been guilty of, except my marriage, which has shaded my visionary prospect of happiness with the heaviest disquietude. Two daughters only are the issue of this marriage; who, thanks to the tuition of their mother, are not wanting in any single accomplishment of modish education. They speak French before they understand English, and play at cards for pounds, without knowing the value of a shilling; and, in a word, by a patrician disrelish of economy, speak themselves the incontested children of Sir Pope Pedigree's daughter. I forbear to mention the manner in which (with their mother's connivance) they affect to expose the obscurity of my family; because I must acknowledge it to have been destitute of the honour of a dignified spendthrift, or an illustrious suicide.

Having lived so long a voluntary exile from the beau monde, my maxims are exploded as quite obsolete. My wife and daughters are perpetually assuring me that I act in no respect like any of my polite neighbours: I will not dispute that they have some colour of truth for this assertion; for you must be sensible, Mr. Fitz-Adam, that it is no easy matter for a man in his grand climacteric to divest himself of old accustomed prejudices; and though I profess all imaginable deference to my great neigh

thor;' insomuch that a man convicted of being a wit is disqualified for business during life; no city apprentice will trust him with his shoes, nor will the poor beau set a foot upon his stool, from an opinion that for want of skill in his calling, his blacking must be bad, or for want of attention, be applied to the stocking instead of the shoe. That almost every Author would choose to set up in this business, if he had wherewithal to begin with, must appear very plainly to all candid observers, from the natural propensity which he discovers towards blackening.

Far be it from me, or any of my brother authors, to intend lowering the dignity of the gentlemen trading in black-ball, by naming them with ourselves: we are extremely sensible of the great distance there is between us; and it is with envy that we look up to the occupation of shoe-cleaning, while we lament the severity of our fortune, in being sentenced to the drudgery of a less respectable employment. But while we are unhappily excluded from the stool and brush, it is surely a very hard case, that the contempt of the world should pursue us, only because we are unfortunate.

I proceed lastly to the Cuckold: and I hope that it will not be a more difficult task to rescue this gentleman from contempt, than either the Parson or the Author. In former times indeed, when a lady happened now and then to prefer a particular friend to her husband, it was usual to hold the said husband in some little disesteem; for as women were allowed to be the best judges of men, and as in the case before us, the wife only preferred one man to another, people were inclined to think that she had some private reasoning for so doing. But in these days of freedom, when a lady, instead of one friend, is civil to one-and-twenty, I am humbly of opinion that her Cuckold is no more the object of contempt for such

a preference, than if he had been robbed by as many highwaymen upon Hounslow-heath. Two to one, says the proverb, are odds at foot-ball; and every one in the present case ought to make proportionable allowance for much greater odds.

But to do honour to Cuckolds, I will be bold to say that they ought oftener to excite envy than contempt. How common is it for a man to owe his fortune to the frailty of his wife! Or though he should reap no pecuniary advantage from her incontinency, how apt are the caresses of a score or two lovers to sweeten her temper towards her husband! A lady is sometimes apt to pay so great a regard to her chastity, as to overlook the virtues of meekness and forbearance: rob her of that one virtue, and you restore her to all the rest, as well as her husband to his quiet.

But waving every thing I have said, there still remains a reason for holding Cuckolds in esteem ; and this is, the regard and veneration which we owe to great men. If our betters are not ashamed of being Cuckolds, it does not become their inferiors to treat them with disrespect.

I shall close this paper with observing upon the three characters which I have here endeavoured to befriend, that while we are obliged to the Parson for a Butt, the Author for Abuse, and to the Cuckold for his wife, it is the highest degree of ingratitude to hold any one of them in contempt.

N° 58. THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 1754.

'

SIR,

'To MR. FITZ-ADAM.

I HARDLY know a more unfortunate circumstance which can happen to a young man than that of being too handsome: it is a thousand to one that in the course of his education he loses the very dignity of his sex and nature. During his infancy his father himself will be too apt to be pleased with the delicacy of his features; his mother will be in raptures with them; and every silly woman who visits in the family will continually lament that master was not a girl, "for what a fine creature would he have made!" If he goes to school, he will be perpetually teased by the nick-name of Miss Molly; and, if he has not great resolution, be obliged to become the most mischievous imp of the whole fraternity, merely to avoid the harder imputations of fear and effeminacy. When he mixes amongst men, the imperfections of his education will stick close to him; the bar itself will hardly cure him of sheepishness, or the cockade defend him from the appearance of cowardice. His very excellences (if he has them) will seem virtues out of nature; they will be the wisdom of a Cornelia, or the heroism of a Sophonisba. Nay, were we to see him mount a breach, I am afraid that instead of those noble eulogies and exclamations which should properly attend a hero in such circumstances, we should only cry out with Mrs. Clerimont in the play," O the brave pretty creature!"

Such are the calamities, Mr. Fitz-Adam, which almost necessarily attend on male beauty; and so

pernicious sometimes are its consequences, that I have more than once been tempted to wish some method could be found out which might extirpate it entirely. What statesman, what generals, what prelates may we have lost, merely by the misfortune of a fine complexion! It is with infinite concern that I frequently look round me in public assemblies, and see such numbers of well-drest youths, who might really have been of use to themselves, and to mankind, had their parents taken the Indian method of marking their faces to distinguish their quality. As it is, their unlucky persons have led them astray into pertness and affectation, under a notion of politeness; and what ought to have been sense and judgment, is at best but a genteel taste in trifles. Thoughtless man! (have I sometimes said to myself, when the melancholy mood was on) how blind is he to futurity! Little do these flutterers think, while their summers are dancing away in dangling to Ranelagh with Lady Biddy and Lady Fanny, that the cold uncomfortable winters of their life must at last terminate in prattling scandal, and playing at quadrille with Lady Bridget and Lady Frances!

-Their way of life

Is fallen into the sear, the yellow leaf,
And that, which should accompany old age,
As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,
They must not look to have.

'Surely, Mr. Fitz-Adam, the preventing such misfortunes might very well become your care, if not that of the legislature. Every body knows that there was a time, even in a Roman army, when "aim at their faces" was as dreadful a sound, and attended with as fatal consequences as "keeping your fire" was on a late glorious occasion. Now, though I would by no means insinuate that a beau must be a coward: nay, though the world has furnished us with many exam