Until that day comes, I shall never believe this boasted point to be any thing more than a conventional fiction; a pageant got up between the sexes, in a certain rank, and at a certain time of life, in which both find their account equally.

I shall be even disposed to rank it among the salutary fictions of life, when in polite circles I shall see the same attentions paid to age as to youth, to homely features as to handsome, to coarse complexions as to clear—­to the woman, as she is a woman, not as she is a beauty, a fortune, or a title.

I shall believe it to be something more than a name, when a well-dressed gentleman in a well-dressed company can advert to the topic of female old age without exciting, and intending to excite, a sneer:—­when the phrases “antiquated virginity,” and such a one has “overstoocl her market,” pronounced in good company, shall raise immediate offence in man, or woman, that shall hear them spoken.

Joseph Paice, of Bread-street-hill, merchant, and one of the Directors of the South-Sea company—­the same to whom Edwards, the Shakspeare commentator, has addressed a fine sonnet—­was the only pattern of consistent gallantry I have met with.  He took me under his shelter at an early age, and bestowed some pains upon me.  I owe to his precepts and example whatever there is of the man of business (and that is not much) in my composition.  It was not his fault that I did not profit more.  Though bred a Presbyterian, and brought up a merchant, he was the finest gentleman of his time.  He had not one system of attention to females in the drawing-room, and another in the shop, or at the stall.  I do not mean that he made no distinction.  But he never lost sight of sex, or overlooked it in the casualties of a disadvantageous situation.  I have seen him stand bare-headed—­smile if you please—­to a poor servant girl, while she has been inquiring of him the way to some street—­in such a posture of unforced civility, as neither to embarrass her in the acceptance, nor himself in the offer, of it.  He was no dangler, in the common acceptation of the word, after women:  but he reverenced and upheld, in every form in which it came before him, womanhood.  I have seen him—­nay, smile not—­tenderly escorting a marketwoman, whom he had encountered in a shower, exalting his umbrella over her poor basket of fruit, that it might receive no damage, with as much carefulness as if she had been a Countess.  To the reverend form of Female Eld he would yield the wall (though it were to an ancient beggar-woman) with more ceremony than we can afford to show our grandams.  He was the Preux Chevalier of Age; the Sir Calidore, or Sir Tristan, to those who have no Calidores or Tristans to defend them.  The roses, that had long faded thence, still bloomed for him in those withered and yellow cheeks.