you those gentlemen in powder and ruffles,
who turned out the toes of their buckled pumps so delicately, were
terrible fellows. Swords were perpetually being drawn; bottles
after bottles were drunk; oaths roared unceasingly in conversation;
tavern-drawers and watchmen were pinked and maimed; chairmen belaboured;
citizens insulted by reeling pleasure-hunters. You have been to Cremorne
with proper "vouchers" of course? Do you remember our great theatres
thirty years ago? You were too good to go to a play. Well, you have
no idea what the playhouses were, or what the green boxes were, when
Garrick and Mrs. Pritchard were playing before them! And I, for my
children's sake, thank that good Actor in his retirement who was
the first to banish that shame from the theatre. No, madam, you are
mistaken; I do not plume myself on my superior virtue. I do not say you
are naturally better than your ancestress in her wild, rouged, gambling,
flaring tearing days; or even than poor Polly Fogle, who is just taken
up for shoplifting, and would have been hung for it a hundred years ago.
Only, I am heartily thankful that my temptations are less, having quite
enough to do with those of the present century.

So, if Harry Warrington rides down to Newmarket to the October meeting,
and loses or wins his money there; if he makes one of a party at the
Shakspeare or Bedford Head; if he dines at White's ordinary, and sits
down to macco and lansquenet afterwards; if he boxes the watch, and
makes his appearance at the Roundhouse; if he turns out for a short
space a wild dissipated, harum-scarum young Harry Warrington; I, knowing
the weakness of human nature, am not going to be surprised; and, quite
aware of my own shortcomings, don't intend to be very savage at my
neighbour's. Mr. Sampson was: in his chapel in Long Acre he whipped Vice
tremendously; gave Sin no quarter; out-cursed Blasphemy with superior
Anathemas; knocked Drunkenness down, and trampled on the prostrate brute
wallowing in the gutter; dragged out conjugal Infidelity, and pounded
her with endless stones of rhetoric--and, after service, came to dinner
at the Star and Garter, made a bowl of punch for Harry and his friends
at the Bedford Head, or took a hand at whist at Mr. Warrington's
lodgings or my Lord March's, or wherever there was a supper and good
company for him.

I often think, however, in respect of Mr. Warrington's doings at this
period of his coming to London, that I may have ta