Credo pudicitiam Saturno rege moratam
In terris. 
Juv., Sat. vi.  I.

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White’s Chocolate-house, July 22.

The other day I took a walk a mile or two out of town and strolling wherever chance led me, I was insensibly carried into a by-road, along which was a very agreeable quickset, of an extraordinary height, which surrounded a very delicious seat and garden.  From one angle of the hedge, I heard a voice cry, “Sir, sir—­” This raised my curiosity, and I heard the same voice say, but in a gentle tone, “Come forward, come forward.”  I did so, and one through the hedge called me by my name, and bade me go on to the left, and I should be admitted to visit an old acquaintance in distress.  The laws of knight-errantry made me obey the summons without hesitation; and I was let in at the back gate of a lovely house by a maid-servant, who carried me from room to room, until I came into a gallery; at the end of which, I saw a fine lady dressed in the most sumptuous habit, as if she were going to a ball, but with the most abject and disconsolate sorrow in her face that I ever beheld.  As I came near, she burst into tears, and cried, “Sir, do not you know the unhappy Teraminta?” I soon recollected her whole person:  “But,” said I, “madam, the simplicity of dress, in which I have ever seen you at your good father’s house, and the cheerfulness of countenance with which you always appeared, are so unlike the fashion and temper you are now in, that I did not easily recover the memory of you.  Your habit was then decent and modest, your looks serene and beautiful:  whence then this unaccountable change?  Nothing can speak so deep a sorrow as your present aspect; yet your dress is made for jollity and revelling.”  “It is,” said she, “an unspeakable pleasure to meet with one I know, and to bewail myself to any that is not an utter stranger to humanity.  When your friend my father died, he left me to a wide world, with no defence against the insults of fortune, but rather, a thousand snares to entrap me in the dangers to which youth and innocence are exposed, in an age wherein honour and virtue are become mere words, and used only as they serve to betray those who understand them in their native sense, and obey them as the guides and motives of their being.  The wickedest of all men living, the abandoned Decius, who has no knowledge of any good art or purpose of human life, but as it tends to the satisfaction of his appetites, had opportunities of frequently seeing and entertaining me at a house where mixed company boarded, and where he placed himself for the base intention which he has since brought to pass.  Decius saw enough in me to raise his brutal desires, and my circumstances gave him hopes of accomplishing them.  But all the glittering expectations he could lay before me, joined by my private terrors of poverty itself, could not for some months prevail upon me; yet, however I hated his intention,