letters, send messages, and form appointments with little raw unthinking girls, and leave them after possession of them, without any mercy, to shame, infamy, poverty, and disease. Were you to read the nauseous impertinences which are written on these occasions, and to see the silly creatures sighing over them, it could not but be matter of mirth as well as pity. A little 'prentice girl of mine has been for some time applied to by an Irish fellow, who dresses very fine, and struts in a laced coat, and is the admiration of seamstresses who are under age in town. Ever since I have had some knowledge of the matter, I have debarred my 'prentice from pen, ink, and paper. But the other day he bespoke some cravats of me: I went out of the shop, and left his mistress to put them up into a band-box in order to be sent to him when his man called. When I came into the shop again, I took occasion to send her away, and found in the bottom of the box written these words, 'Why would you ruin a harmless creature that loves you?' then in the lid, There is no resisting Strephon:' I searched a little further, and found in the rim of the box, At eleven o'clock at night come in a hackney-coach at the end of our street.' This was enough to alarm me; I sent away the things, and took my measures accordingly. An hour or two before the appointed time I examined my young lady, and found her trunk stuffed with impertinent letters and an old scroll of parchment in Latin, which her lover had sent her as a settlement of fifty pounds a year. Among other things, there was also the best lace I had in my shop to make him a present for cravats. I was very

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glad of this last circumstance, because I could very conscientiously swear against him that he had enticed my servant away, and was her accomplice in

robbing me: I procured a warrant against him accordingly. Every thing was now prepared, and the tender hour of love approaching, I, who had acted for myself in my youth the same senseless part, knew how to manage accordingly; therefore, after having locked up my maid, and not being so much unlike her in height and shape as in a huddled way not to pass for her, I delivered the bundle designed to be carried off to her lover's man, who came with the signal to receive them. Thus I followed after to the coach, where, when I saw his master take them in, I cried out, Thieves! thieves!' and the constable with his attendants seized my expecting lover. I kept myself unobserved till I saw the crowd sufficiently increased, and then appeared, to declare the goods to be mine; and had the satisfaction to see my man of mode put into the round-house, with the stolen wares by him, to be produced in evidence against the next morning. This matter is notoriously known to be fact; and I have been contented to save my 'prentice, and take a year's rent of this mortified lover, not to appear further in the matter. This was some penance; but, Sir, is this enough for a villany of much more pernicious consequence than the trifles for which he was to have been indicted? Should not you, and all men of any parts or honour, put things upon so right a foot, as that such a rascal should not laugh at the imputation of what he was really guilty, and dread being accused of that for which he was arrested?

"In a word, Sir, it is in the power of you, and such as I hope you are, to make it as infamous to rob a poor creature of her honour as her clothes. I leave this to your consideration, only take leave, which I cannot do without sighing, to remark to you, that if this had been the sense of mankind thirty

VOL. VII.

justify this assertion, I shall put my reader in mind of Horace, the greatest wit and critic in the Augustan age; and of Boileau, the most correct poet among the moderns; not to mention La Fontaine, who by this way of writing is come more into vogue than any other author of our times.

The fables I have here mentioned are raised altogether upon brutes and vegetables, with some of our own species mixed among them, when the moral hath so required. But, besides this kind of fable, there is another, in which the actors are passions, virtues, vices, and other imaginary persons of the like nature. Some of the ancient critics will have it, that the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer are fables of this nature; and that the several names of gods' and heroes are nothing else but the affections of the mind in a visible shape and character. Thus they tell us, that Achilles, in the first Iliad, represents anger, or the irascible part of human nature; that upon drawing his sword against his superior in a full assembly, Pallas is only another name for reason, which checks and advises him upon that occasion; and at her first appearance touches him upon the head, that part of the man being looked upon as the seat of reason. And thus of the rest of the poem. As for the Odyssey, I think it is plain that Horace considered it as one of these allegorical fables, by the moral which he has given us of several parts of it. The greatest Italian wits have applied themselves to the writing of this latter kind of fables. Spenser's Fairy-Queen is one continued series of them from the beginning to the end of that admirable work. If we look into the finest prose-authors of antiquity, such as Cicero, Plato, Xenophon, and many others, we shall find that this was likewise their favourite kind of fable. I shall only further observe upon it, that the first of this sort that made

any considerable figure in the world was that of Hercules meeting with Pleasure and Virtue; which was invented by Prodicus, who lived before Socrates, and in the first dawnings of philosophy. He used to travel through Greece by virtue of this fable, which procured him a kind reception in all the markettowns, where he never failed telling it as soon as he had gathered an audience about him.

After this short preface, which I have made up of such materials as my memory does at present suggest to me, before I present my reader with a fable of this kind, which I design as the entertainment of the present paper, I must in a few words open the occasion of it.

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In the account which Plato gives us of the conversation and behaviour of Socrates, the morning he was to die, he tells the following circumstance: When Socrates his' fetters were knocked off, as was usual to be done on the day that the condemned person was to be executed, being seated in the midst of his disciples, and laying one of his legs over the other, in a very unconcerned posture, he began to rub it where it had been galled by the iron; and whether it was to show the indifference with which he entertained the thoughts of his approaching death, or, after his usual manner, to take every occasion of philosophizing upon some useful subject, he observed the pleasure of that sensation which now arose in those very parts of his leg that just before had been 80 much pained by the fetter. Upon this, he reflected on the nature of pleasure and pain in general, and how constantly they succeed one another. To this he added, that if a man of a good genius for a fable were to represent the nature of pleasure and pain in that way of writing, he would probably join them together after such a manner, that it would be

impossible for the one to come into any place without being followed by the other.

It is possible, that if Plato had thought it proper at such a time to describe Socrates launching out into a discourse which was not of a piece with the business of the day, he would have enlarged upon this hint, and have drawn it out into some beautiful allegory or fable. But since he has not done it, I shall attempt to write one myself in the spirit of that

divine author.

'There were two families which from the beginning of the world were as opposite to each other as light and darkness. The one of them lived in heaven, and the other in hell. The youngest descendant of the first family was Pleasure, who was the daughter of Happiness, who was the child of Virtue, who was the offspring of the Gods. These, as I said before, had their habitation in heaven. The youngest of the opposite family was Pain, who was the son of Misery, who was the child of Vice, who was the offspring of the Furies. The habitation of this race of beings was in hell.

The middle station of nature between these two opposite extremes was the earth, which was inhabited by creatures of a middle kind, neither so virtuous as the one, nor so vicious as the other, but partaking of the good and bad qualities of these two opposite families. Jupiter considering that this speies, commonly called man, was too virtuous to be serable, and too vicious to be happy, that he ght make a distinction between the good and the i, ordered the two youngest of the above-menned families, Pleasure who was the daughter of appiness, and Pain who was the son of Misery, to eet one another upon this part of nature which lay