If this be true, how melancholy must be the consideration that any single beau, especially if he have but half a yard of ribbon in his hat, shall weigh heavier in the scale of female affection than twenty Sir Isaac Newtons!  How must our reader, who perhaps had wisely accounted for the resistance which the chaste Laetitia had made to the violent addresses of the ravished (or rather ravishing) Wild from that lady’s impregnable virtue—­how must he blush, I say, to perceive her quit the strictness of her carriage, and abandon herself to those loose freedoms which she indulged to Smirk!  But alas! when we discover all, as to preserve the fidelity of our history we must, when we relate that every familiarity had past between them, and that the fair Laetitia (for we must, in this single instance, imitate Virgil when he drops the pius and the pater, and drop our favourite epithet of chaste), the fair Laetitia had, I say, made Smirk as happy as Wild desired to be, what must then be our reader’s confusion!  We will, therefore, draw a curtain over this scene, from that philogyny which is in us, and proceed to matters which, instead of dishonouring the human species, will greatly raise and ennoble it.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Containing as notable instances of human greatness as are to be met with in ancient or modern history.  Concluding with some wholesome hints to the gay part of mankind.

Wild no sooner parted from the chaste Laetitia than, recollecting that his friend the count was returned to his lodgings in the same house, he resolved to visit him; for he was none of those half-bred fellows who are ashamed to see their friends when they have plundered and betrayed them; from which base and pitiful temper many monstrous cruelties have been transacted by men, who have sometimes carried their modesty so far as to the murder or utter ruin of those against whom their consciences have suggested to them that they have committed some small trespass, either by the debauching a friend’s wife or daughter, belying or betraying the friend himself, or some other such trifling instance.  In our hero there was nothing not truly great:  he could, without the least abashment, drink a bottle with the man who knew he had the moment before picked his pocket; and, when he had stripped him of everything he had, never desired to do him any further mischief; for he carried good-nature to that wonderful and uncommon height that he never did a single injury to man or woman by which he himself did not expect to reap some advantage.  He would often indeed say that by the contrary party men often made a bad bargain with the devil, and did his work for nothing.