LETTER CCXVI.220.

　　To Mrs.Rivers, Bellfield, Rutland.

　　London, Nov.18, twelve at night.

　　Who should I dine and sup with to-day, at a merchant’s in the city, but your old love, Sir George Clayton, as gay and amusing as ever!

　　What an entertaining companion have you lost, my dear Emily!

　　He was a little disconcerted at seeing me, and blushed extremely; but soon recovered his amiable, uniform insipidity of countenance, and smiled and simpered as usual.

　　He never enquired after you, nor even mentioned your name; being asked for a toast, I had the malice to give Rivers; he drank him, without seeming ever to have heard of him before.

　　The city misses admire him prodigiously, and he them; they are charmed with his beauty, and he with their wit.

　　His mother, poor woman!could not bring the match she wrote about to bear: the family approved him; but the fair one made a better choice, and gave herself last week, at St.George’s, Hanover-square, to a very agreable fellow of our acquaintance, Mr.Palmer; a man of sense and honor, who deserves her had she been ten times richer: he has a small estate in Lincolnshire, and his house is not above twenty miles from you: I must bring you and Mrs.Palmer acquainted.

　　I suppose you are now the happiest of beings; Rivers finding a thousand new beauties in his belle paisanne, and you exulting in your charms, or, in other words, glorying in your strength.

　　So the maiden aunts in your neighbourhood think Miss Williams no better than she should be?

　　Either somebody has said, or the idea is my own; after all, I believe it Shenstone’s, That those are generally the best people, whose characters have been most injured by slanderers, as we usually find that the best fruit which the birds have been pecking at.

　　I will, however, allow appearances were a little against your cottager; and I would forgive the good old virgins, if they had always as suspicious circumstances to determine from.

　　But they generally condemn from trifling indiscretions, and settle the characters of their own sex from their conduct at a time of life when they are themselves no judges of its propriety; they pass sentence on them for small errors, when it is an amazing proof of prudence not to commit great ones.

　　For my own part, I think those who never have been guilty of any indiscretion, are generally people who have very little active virtue.

　　The waving line holds in moral as well as in corporeal beauty.

　　Adieu!

　　Yours ever,

　　A.Fitzgerald.

　　All I can say is, that if imprudence is a sin, heaven help your poor little Bell!

　　On those principles, Sir George is the most virtuous man in the world; to which assertion, I believe, you will enter a caveat. The History of Emily Montague