* Whoever has seen Dean Swift’s Lady’s Dressing room, will think this description of Mr. Belford’s not only more natural, but more decent painting, as well as better justified by the design, and by the use that may be made of it.

But when I approached the old wretch, what a spectacle presented itself to my eyes!

Her misfortune has not at all sunk, but rather, as I thought, increased her flesh; rage and violence perhaps swelling her muscular features.  Behold her, then, spreading the whole troubled bed with her huge quaggy carcase:  her mill-post arms held up; her broad hands clenched with violence; her big eyes, goggling and flaming ready as we may suppose those of a salamander; her matted griesly hair, made irreverend by her wickedness (her clouted head-dress being half off, spread about her fat ears and brawny neck;) her livid lips parched, and working violently; her broad chin in convulsive motion; her wide mouth, by reason of the contraction of her forehead (which seemed to be half-lost in its own frightful furrows) splitting her face, as it were, into two parts; and her huge tongue hideously rolling in it; heaving, puffing as if four breath; her bellows-shaped and various-coloured breasts ascending by turns to her chin, and descending out of sight, with the violence of her gaspings.

This was the spectacle, as recollection has enabled me to describe it, that this wretch made to my eye, by her suffragans and daughters, who surveyed her with scouling frighted attention, which one might easily see had more in it of horror and self-concern (and self-condemnation too) than of love or pity; as who should say, See! what we ourselves must one day be!

As soon as she saw me, her naturally-big voice, more hoarsened by her ravings, broke upon me:  O Mr. Belford!  O Sir! see what I am come to!—­ See what I am brought to!—­To have such a cursed crew about me, and not one of them to take care of me!  But to let me tumble down stairs so distant from the room I went from! so distant from the room I meant to go to!—­Cursed, cursed be every careless devil!—­May this or worse be their fate every one of them!

And then she cursed and swore most vehemently, and the more, as two or three of them were excusing themselves on the score of their being at that time as unable to help themselves as she.  As soon as she had cleared the passage of her throat by the oaths and curses which her wild impatience made her utter, she began in a more hollow and whining strain to bemoan herself.  And here, said she—­Heaven grant me patience! [clenching and unclenching her hands] am I to die thus miserably!—­of a broken leg in my old age!—­snatched away by means of my own intemperance!  Self-do!  Self-undone!—­No time for my affairs!  No time to repent!—­And in a few hours (Oh!—­Oh!—­with another long howling O—­h!—­U—­gh—­o! a kind of screaming key terminating it) who knows, who can tell where I shall be?—­Oh! that indeed I never, never, had had a being!