not expect they shall be capable of it from a fond opinion some have often in their mouths, that if we do not leave our desires they will leave us. It is far otherwise I am now as vain in my dress, and as flippant if I see a pretty woman, as when in my youth I stood upon a bench in the pit to survey the whole circle of beauties. The folly is so extravagant with me, and I went on with so little check of my desires, or resignation of them, that I can assure you I very often, merely to entertain my own thoughts, sit with my spectacles on writing love-letters to the beauties that have been long since in their graves. This is to warm my heart with the faint memory of delights which were once agreeable to me; but how much happier would my life have been now if I could have looked back on any worthy action done for my country? if I had laid out that which I profused1 in luxury and wantonness in acts of generosity and charity? I have lived a bachelor to this day; and instead of a numerous offspring, with which, in the regular ways of life, I might possibly have delighted myself, I have only to amuse myself with the repetition of old stories and intrigues which no one will believe I ever was concerned in. I do not know whether you have ever treated of it or not; but you cannot fall on a better subject than that of the art of growing old. In such a lecture you must propose that no one set his heart upon what is transient; the beauty grows wrinkled while we are yet gazing at her. The witty man sinks into a humorist imperceptibly for want of reflecting that all things around him are in a flux, and continually changing: thus he is in the space of ten or fifteen years surrounded by a new set of people, 1 Squandered.

whose manners are as natural to them as his delights, method of thinking, and mode of living, were formerly to him and his friends. But the mischief is, he looks upon the same kind of errors which he himself was guilty of with an eye of scorn, and with that sort of ill-will which men entertain against each other for different opinions: thus a crazy constitution, and an uneasy mind, is fretted with vexatious passions for young men's doing foolishly what it is folly to do at all. Dear sir, this is my present state of mind; I hate those I should laugh at, and envy those I contemn. The time of youth and vigorous manhood, passed the way in which I have disposed of it, is attended with these consequences; but to those who live and pass away life as they ought, all parts of it are equally pleasant; only the memory of good and worthy actions is a feast which must give a quicker relish to the soul than ever it could possibly taste in the highest enjoyments or jollities of youth. As for me, if I sit down in my great chair and begin to ponder, the vagaries of a child are not more ridiculous than the circumstances which are heaped up in my memory; fine gowns, country dances, ends of tunes, interrupted conversations, and midnight quarrels, are what must necessarily compose my soliloquy. I beg of you to print this, that some ladies of my acquaintance, and my years, may be persuaded to wear warm night-caps this cold season; and that my old friend Jack Tawdery may buy him a cane, and not creep with the air of a strut. I must add to all this, that if it were not for one pleasure, which I thought a very mean one till of very late years, I should have no one great satisfaction left; but if I live to the 10th of March 1714, and all

my securities are good, I shall be worth fifty thou

sand pound. I am,

SIR,

Your most humble Servant,

'Mr. SPECTATOR,

JACK AFTERDAY.'

'You will infinitely oblige a distressed lover if you will insert in your very next paper the following letter to my mistress. You must know I am not a person apt to despair, but she has got an odd humour of stopping short unaccountably, and, as she herself told a confidante of hers, she has cold fits. These fits shall last her a month or six weeks together; and as she falls into them without provocation, so it is to be hoped she will return from them without the merit of new services. But life and love will not admit of such intervals, therefore pray let her be admonished as follows:

'I LOVE you, and I honour you; therefore pray do not tell me of waiting till decencies, till forms, till humours are consulted and gratified. If you have that happy constitution as to be indolent for ten weeks together, you should consider that all that while I burn in impatiences and fevers; but still you say it will be time enough, though I and you too grow older while we are yet talking.' Which do you think the more reasonable, that you should alter a state of indifference for happiness, and that to oblige me; or I live in torment, and that to lay 1 Cf. Horace, 1 Od. xi. 7

Dum loquimur, fugerit invida
Ætas.'

no manner of obligation upon you? While I indulge your insensibility I am doing nothing; if you favour my passion, you are bestowing bright desires, gay hopes, generous cares, noble resolutions, and transporting raptures upon,

MADAM,

Your most devoted humble Servant.'

'Mr. SPECTATOR,

'HERE'S a gentlewoman lodges in the same house with me, that I never did any injury to in my whole life; and she is always railing at me to those that she knows will tell me of it. Don't you think she is in love with me? or would you have me break my mind yet or not?

'Mr. SPECTATOR,

1

Your Servant,

T. B.'

I AM a footman in a great family, and am in love with the housemaid. We were all at hotcockles last night in the hall these holidays; when I lay down and was blinded, she pulled off her shoe, and hit me with the heel such a rap as almost broke my head to pieces. Pray, sir, was this love or spite?

1 See No. 245. Gay (Shepherd's Week') writes

As at hot-cockles once I laid me down,

And felt the weighty hand of many a clown;

Buxoma gave a gentle tap, and I

Quick rose, and read soft mischief in her eye.'

T.

No. 261. Saturday, Dec. 29, 1711

MY

[ADDISON.1

Γάμος γὰρ ἀνθρώποισιν ευκταῖον κακόν.

-Frag. Vet. Poet.

Y father, whom I mentioned in my first speculation, and whom I must always name with honour and gratitude, has very frequently talked to me upon the subject of marriage. I was in my younger years engaged, partly by his advice and partly by my own inclinations, in the courtship of a person who had a great deal of beauty, and did not at my first approaches seem to have any aversion to me; but as my natural taciturnity hindered me from showing myself to the best advantage, she by degrees began to look upon me as a very silly fellow, and being resolved to regard merit more than anything else in the persons who made their applications to her, she married a captain of dragoons who happened to be beating up for recruits in those parts.

2

This unlucky accident has given me an aversion to pretty fellows ever since, and discouraged me from trying my fortune with the fair sex. The

1 Addison's mark, C,' which appears on the folio issue of this and the following number, is omitted, no doubt by accident, in the collected edition.

2 There are several papers in the Tatler (Nos. 21, 24, &c.) on 'pretty fellows' and very pretty fellows.' Jack Dimple, being just able to find out, that what makes Sophronius [the true gentleman] acceptable is a natural behaviour, in order to this same reputation, makes his own an artificial one. . . . He will meditate within for half-an-hour until he thinks he is not careless enough in his air, and come back to the mirror to recollect his forgetfulness.'