of danger to throw a new
gown or petticoat in her way. When she was about twenty-five years of
age, she fell in love with a man of an agreeable temper, and equal
fortune, and would certainly have married him, had not my grandfather,
Sir Jacob, dressed her up in a suit of flowered satin; upon which, she
set so immoderate a value upon herself, that the lover was contemned and
discarded. In the fortieth year of her age, she was again smitten, but
very luckily transferred her passion to a tippet, which was presented to
her by another relation who was in the plot. This, with a white sarcenet
hood, kept her safe in the family till fifty. About sixty, which
generally produces a kind of latter spring[179] in amorous
constitutions, my Aunt Margery had again a colt's-tooth[180] in her
head, and would certainly have eloped from the mansion-house, had not
her brother Simon, who was a wise man, and a scholar, advised to dress
her in cherry-coloured ribands,[181] which was the only expedient that
could have been found out by the wit of man to preserve the thousand
pounds in our family, part of which I enjoy at this time.

This discourse puts me in mind of a humorist mentioned by Horace,[182]
called Eutrapelus, who, when he designed to do a man a mischief, made
him a present of a gay suit; and brings to my memory another passage of
the same author, when he describes the most ornamental dress that a
woman can appear in with two words, _simplex munditiis_,[183] which I
have quoted for the benefit of my female readers.

[Footnote 171: This paper, though not included in Addison's Works, may,
as Nichols suggested, be his. Two slight corrections were made in the
following number in the folio issue.]

[Footnote 172: See No. 8, with reference to the long-continued mourning,
on the decease of the Queen's husband, George Prince of Denmark, who
died in October 1708. Lewis Duke of Bourbon, eldest son to the Dauphin
of France, died on March 3, about three weeks before the date of this
paper. A month before, on February 2, 1709-10, in consequence of a
petition presented by the mercers, &c., complaining of their sufferings
from the length and frequency of public mournings, leave was given to
bring in a Bill for ascertaining and limiting the time of them.]

[Footnote 173: The furbelow was a puckered flounce ornamenting the
dress. D'Urfey wrote a play, "The Old Mode and the New, or Country Miss
with her Furbelow."]

[Footnote 174: Introduced fr