vintners and apothecaries. All bachelors are under their immediate inspection, and my friend produced to me a report given in to their Board, wherein an old uncle of mine, who came to town with me, and myself were inserted, and we stood thus: the uncle smoky, rotten, poor; the nephew raw, but no fool, sound at present, very rich. My information did not end here, but my friend's advices are so good, that he could show me a copy of the letter sent to the young lady who is to have me; which I enclose to you. "MADAM, "THIS is to let you know, that you are to be married to a beau that comes out on Thursday six in the evening. Be at the Park. Be at the Park. You cannot but know a virgin-fop; they have a mind to look saucy, but are out of countenance. The Board has denied him to several good families. I wish you joy. CORINNA."' What makes my correspondent's case the more deplorable is that, as I find by the report from my censor of marriages, the friend he speaks of is employed by the Inquisition to take him in, as the phrase is. After all that is told him, he has information only of one woman that is laid for him, and that the wrong one; for the lady-commissioners have devoted him to another than the person against whom they have employed their agent his friend to alarm him. The plot is laid so well about this young gentleman, that he has no friend to retire to, no place to appear in, or part of the kingdom to fly into, but he must fall into the notice, and be subject to the power of the Inquisition. They have their emissaries and substitutes in all parts of this united kingdom. The first step they usually take, is to find, from a correspondence by their messengers and whisperers with some domestic of the bachelor (who is to be hunted into the toils they have laid for him), what are his manners, his familiarities, his good qualities, or vices; not as the good in him is a recommendation, or the ill a diminution, but as they affect or contribute to the main inquiry, what estate he has in him? When this point is well reported to the Board, they can take in a wild roaring foxhunter, as easily as a soft gentle young fop of the town. The way is to make all places uneasy to him, but the scenes in which they have allotted him to act. His brother huntsmen, bottle companions, his fraternity of fops, shall be brought into the conspiracy against him. Then this matter is not laid in so barefaced a manner before him, as to have it intimated Mrs. Such-a-one would make him a very proper wife; but by the force of their correspondence they shall make it (as Mr. Waller said of the marriage of the dwarfs) as impracticable to have any woman besides her they design him, as it would have been in Adam to have refused Eve.1 The man named by the Commission for Mrs. Such-aone, shall neither be in fashion, nor dare ever to appear in company, should he attempt to evade their determination. 1 Design, or chance, makes others wive: As she denied her little bed To him for whom Heaven seemed to frame, And measure out, this only dame. -Of the Marriage of the Dwarfs. The female sex wholly govern domestic life; and by this means, when they think fit they can sow dissensions between the dearest friends, nay make father and son irreconcilable enemies, in spite of all the ties of gratitude on one part, and the duty of protection to be paid on the other. The ladies of the Inquisition understand this perfectly; and where love is not a motive to a man's choosing one whom they allot, they can, with very much art, insinuate stories. to the disadvantage of his honesty or courage, till the creature is too much dispirited to bear up against a general ill reception which he everywhere meets with, and in due time falls into their appointed wedlock for shelter. I have a long letter bearing date the fourth instant, which gives me a large account of the policies of this court; and find there is now before them a very refractory person who has escaped all their machinations for two years last past; but they have prevented two successive matches which were of his own inclination, the one, by a report that his mistress was to be married, and the very day appointed, wedding-clothes bought, and all things ready for her being given to another; the second time, by insinuating to all his mistress's friends and acquaintance, that he had been false to several other women, and the like. The poor man is now reduced to profess he designs to lead a single life; but the Inquisition give out to all his acquaintance, that nothing is intended but the gentleman's own welfare and happiness. When this is urged, he talks still more humbly, and protests he aims only at a life without pain or reproach. Pleasure, honour, or riches are things for which he has no taste. But notwithstanding all this and what else he may defend himself with, as that the lady is too old or too young, of a suitable humour, or the quite contrary, and that it is impossible they can ever do other than wrangle from June to January, everybody tells him all this is spleen, and he must have a wife; while all the members of the Inquisition are unanimous in a certain woman for him, and they think they altogether are better able to judge than he or any other private person whatsoever. TEMPLE, March 3, 1711. 1 'SIR, 'YOUR speculation this day on the subject of idleness has employed me, ever since I read it, in sorrowful reflections on my having loitered away the term (or rather the vacation) of ten years in this place, and unhappily suffered a good chamber and study to lie idle as long. My books (except those I have taken to sleep upon) have been totally neglected, and my Lord Coke and other venerable authors were never so slighted in their lives. I spend most of the day at a neighbouring coffeehouse, where we have what I may call a lazy club. We generally come in nightgowns, with our stockings about our heels, and sometimes but one on. salutation at entrance is a yawn and a stretch, and then without more ceremony we take our place at the lolling-table; where our discourse is, what I fear you would not read out, therefore shall not insert. But I assure you, sir, I heartily lament this loss of time, and am now resolved (if possible, with double diligence) to retrieve it, being effectually awakened by the arguments of Mr. Slack out of the senseless stupidity that has so long possessed me. And to demonstrate that penitence accompanies my 1 See No. 316. Our confession, and constancy my resolutions, I have locked my door for a year, and desire you would let my companions know I am not within. I am with great respect, SIR, Nec satis est pulchra esse poemata; dulcia sunto. TH HOSE who know how many volumes have been written on the poems of Homer and Virgil, will easily pardon the length of my discourse upon Milton. The Paradise Lost' is looked upon by the best judges as the greatest production, or at least the noblest work of genius, in our language, and therefore deserves to be set before an English reader in its full beauty. For this reason, though I have endeavoured to give a general idea of its graces and imperfections in my first six papers, I thought myself obliged to bestow one upon every book in particular. The three first books I have already despatched, and am now entering upon the fourth. I need not acquaint my reader that there are multitudes of beauties in this great author, especially in the descriptive parts of his poem, which I have not touched upon; it being my intention to point out those only which appear to me the most exquisite, or those which are not so obvious to ordinary readers. Every one that has read the critics who have written upon the Odyssey, |