I yet possessed chastity enough to refuse fifty for a night’s lodging, and that too from a handsome well-bred man.  I shall scarcely ever forget his words to me, as they seemed almost prophetic.  “Well, madam, said he, you do not know London; you will be undone there.”  “Why, sir, said I, I hope you don’t imagine I will go into a bad course of life?” “No, madam, said he, but I think you will sit in your chamber and starve;” which, upon my word, I have been pretty near doing; and, but that the Almighty raised me one worthy friend, good old Mr. Cibber, to whose humanity I am indebted, under God, both for liberty and life, I had been quite lost.’

When Mrs. Pilkington arrived in London, her conduct was the reverse of what prudence would have dictated.  She wanted to get into favour with the great, and, for that purpose, took a lodging in St. James’s Street, at a guinea a week; upon no other prospect of living, than what might arise from some poems she intended to publish by subscription.  In this place she attracted the notice of the company frequenting White’s Chocolate-House; and her story, by means of Mr. Cibber, was made known to persons of the first distinction, who, upon his recommendation, were kind to her.

Her acquaintance with Mr. Cibber began by a present she made him of The Trial of Constancy, a poem of hers, which Mr. Dodsley published.  Mr. Cibber, upon this, visited her, and, ever after, with the most unwearied zeal, promoted her interest.  The reader cannot expect that we should swell this volume by a minute relation of all the incidents which happened to her, while she continued a poetical mendicant.  She has not, without pride, related all the little tattle which passed between her and persons of distinction, who, through the abundance of their idleness, thought proper to trifle an hour with her.

Her virtue seems now to have been in a declining state; at least, her behaviour was such, that a man, must have extraordinary faith, who can think her innocent.  She has told us, in the second volume of her Memoirs, that she received from a noble person a present of fifty pounds.  This, she says, was the ordeal, or fiery trial; youth, beauty, nobility of birth, attacking at once the most desolate person in the world.  However, we find her soon after this thrown into great distress, and making various applications to persons of distinction for subscriptions to her poems.  Such as favoured her by subscribing, she has repaid with most lavish encomiums, and those that withheld that proof of their bounty, she has sacrificed to her resentment, by exhibiting them in the most hideous light her imagination could form.