a more favourable opinion of an action, which her beauty, the bewitching softness of the entertainment, and the place they were in, had all concurred to make him guilty of; but she would listen to nothing on that head, insisted on his never taking the least notice of her, wherever they might chance to meet; and only told him, that tho’ she was unalterably fixed in this resolution, yet he might depend upon it she hated him less than she did herself.

Finding she was not to be moved, he obeyed her commands, and straight went out of the box, more amazed at the oddness of the adventure, than can be well expressed; and yet more so, when he afterwards heard she was the wife of a person of great condition, was in the first month of her marriage with him, and had the reputation of a woman of strict virtue.

As this false step was meerly accidental, wholly unpremeditated on either side, and by what can be judged by the character of the lady, and her behaviour afterwards, was no more on her part than a surprize on the senses, in which the mind was not consulted, and had not the least share, I know not whether it may not more justly be called a slip of unguarded nature, than a real crime in her; and as for Natura, though certainly the most guilty of the two, whoever considers his youth, his constitution, and above all the greatness of the temptation, which presented itself before him, will allow, that he must either have been more, or less, than man, to have behaved otherwise than he did.

Let the most severely virtuous, who happily have never fallen into the same error, but figure to themselves the circumstances of this transgressing pair, and well consider in what manner nature must operate, when thus powerfully excited, and if they are not rendered totally incapable of any soft sensations, by an uncommon frigidity of constitution, they will cease either to wonder at, or too cruelly condemn, the effects of so irresistible an impulse.

Were it not for the precepts of religion and morality, the fears of scandal, and shame of offending against law and custom, man would undoubtedly think himself intitled to the same privileges which the brute creation in this point enjoy above him; and it is not therefore strange, that whenever reason nods, as it sometimes will do, even in those who are most careful to preserve themselves under its subjection, that the senses ever craving, ever impatient for gratification, should readily snatch the opportunity of indulging themselves, and which it is observable they ordinarily do to the greater excess, by so much the longer, and the more strictly they have been kept under restraint.

CHAP.  III.