easily
consent to gratify; but virtue is not to be consulted when men are to
raise their fortunes by favour of the great. His measures were censured;
I wrote in his defence, and was recompensed with a place, of which the
profits were never received by me without the pangs of remembering that
they were the reward of wickedness; a reward which nothing but that
necessity, which the consumption of my little estate in these wild
pursuits had brought upon me, hindered me from throwing back in the face
of my corruptor.

22. At this time my uncle died without a will, and I became heir to a
small fortune. I had resolution to throw off the splendor which
reproached me to myself, and retire to an humbler state, in which I am
now endeavouring to recover the dignity of virtue, and hope to make some
reparation for my crimes and follies, by informing others who may be led
after the same pageants, that they are about to engage in a course of
life, in which they are to purchase, by a thousand miseries, the
privilege of repentance.

_I am_, &c.

EUBULUS.

_What it is to see the World; the Story of Melissa._

RAMBLER, No. 75.

1. The diligence with which you endeavour to cultivate the knowledge of
nature, manners, and life, will perhaps incline you to pay some regard
to the observations of one who has been taught to know mankind by
unwelcome information, and whose opinions are the result, not of
solitary conjectures, but of practice and experience.

2. I was born to a large fortune, and bred to the knowledge of those
arts which are supposed to accomplish the mind, and adorn the person of
a woman. To these attainments, which custom and education almost forced
upon me, I added some voluntary acquisitions by the use of books and the
conversation of that species of men whom the ladies generally mention
with terror and aversion under the name of scholars, but whom I have
found a harmless and inoffensive order of beings, not no much wiser than
ourselves, but that they may receive as well as communicate knowledge,
and more inclined to degrade their own character by cowardly submission,
than to overbear or oppress us with their learning or their wit.

3. From these men, however, if they are by kind treatment encouraged to
talk, something may be gained, which, embelished with elegancy, and
softened by modesty, will always add dignity and value to female
conversation; and from my acquaintance with the bookish part of the
world,