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White's Chocolate-house, June 9.

Pacolet being gone a strolling among the men of the sword, in order to
find out the secret causes of the frequent disputes we meet with, and
furnish me with material for my treatise on duelling; I have room left
to go on in my information to my country readers, whereby they may
understand the bright people whose memoirs I have taken upon me to
write. But in my discourse of the 28th of the last month,[289] I omitted
to mention the most agreeable of all bad characters; and that is, a
Rake.

A Rake is a man always to be pitied; and if he lives, is one day
certainly reclaimed; for his faults proceed not from choice or
inclination, but from strong passions and appetites, which are in youth
too violent for the curb of reason, good sense, good manners, and good
nature: all which he must have by nature and education, before he can be
allowed to be, or have been of this order. He is a poor unwieldy wretch,
that commits faults out of the redundance of his good qualities. His
pity and compassion make him sometimes a bubble to all his fellows, let
them be never so much below him in understanding. His desires run away
with him through the strength and force of a lively imagination, which
hurries him on to unlawful pleasures, before reason has power to come in
to his rescue. Thus, with all the good intentions in the world to
amendment, this creature sins on against heaven, himself, his friends,
and his country, who all call for a better use of his talents. There is
not a being under the sun so miserable as this: he goes on in a pursuit
he himself disapproves, and has no enjoyment but what is followed by
remorse; no relief from remorse, but the repetition of his crime. It is
possible I may talk of this person with too much indulgence; but I must
repeat it, that I think this a character which is the most the object of
pity of any in the world. The man in the pangs of the stone, gout, or
any acute distempers, is not in so deplorable a condition in the eye of
right sense, as he that errs and repents, and repents and errs on. The
fellow with broken limbs justly deserves your alms for his impotent
condition; but he that cannot use his own reason, is in a much worse
state; for you see him in miserable circumstances, with his remedy at
the same time in his own possession, if he would or could use it. This
is the cause, that of all ill characters, the rake has the best quarter
in the wo