When her lover entered the room, her features flushed with shame and joy; and the ingenuous manner, so full of passion and of awe, with which Tranquillus approached to salute her, gave me good omens of his future behaviour towards her. The wedding was wholly under my care. After the ceremony at church, I resolved to entertain the company with a dinner suitable to the occasion, and pitched upon the Apollo, at the Old Devil at Temple--bar, as a place sacred to mirth tempered with discretion, where Ben Jonson and his sons used to make their liberal meetings. Here the chief of the Staffian race appeared; and as soon as the company were come into that ample room, Lepidus Wagstaff began to make me compliments for choosing that place, and fell into discourse upon the subject of pleasure and entertainment, drawn from the rules of Ben's club, which are in gold letters over the chimney. Lepidus has a way very uncommon, and speaks on subjects on which any man else would certainly offend, with great dexterity. He gave us a large account of the public meetings of all the well turned minds who had passed through this life in ages past, and closed his pleasing narrative with a discourse on marriage, and a repetition of the following verses out of Milton :

"Hail, wedded love! mysterious law! true source
Of human offspring, sole propriety

In paradise, of all things common else.

By thee adult'rous lust was driven from men
Among the bestial herds to range; by thee,
Founded in reason, loyal, just, and pure,
Relations dear, and all the charities

Of father, son, and brother, first were known.
Perpetual fountain of domestic sweets,
Whose bed is undefil'd and chaste pronounc'd,
Present or passed, as saints or patriarchs us'd.
Here Love his golden shafts employs, here lights
His constant lamp, and waves his purple wings:
Reigns here, and revels not in the bought smile
Of harlots, loveless, joyless, unendear'd,

Casual fruition; nor in court amours,

Mix'd dance, or wanton mask, or midnight ball,
Or serenade, which the starv'd lover sings

To his proud fair, best quitted with disdain."

In these verses, all the images that can come into a young woman's head on such an occasion are raised; but that in so chaste and elegant a manner, that the bride

thanked him for his agreeable talk, and we sat down to dinner.

Among the rest of the company, there was got in a fellow you call a Wag. This ingenious person is the usual life of all feasts, and merriments, by speaking absurdities, and putting every body of breeding and modesty out of countenance. As soon as we sat down, he drank to the bride's diversion that night; and then made twenty double meanings on the word thing. We are the best-bred family, for one so numerous, in this kingdom; and indeed we should all of us have been as much out of countenance as the bride, but that we were relieved by an honest rough relation of ours at the lower end of the table, who is a lieutenant of marines. The soldier and sailor had good plain sense, and saw what was wrong as well as another; he had a way of looking at his plate, and speaking aloud in an inward manner; and whenever the wag mentioned the word thing or the words that same, the lieutenant in that voice cried, "Knock him down." The merry

man, wondering, angry, and looking round, was the diversion of the table. When he offered to recover, and say, "To the bride's best thoughts."-"Knock him down," says the lieutenant, and so on. This silly humour diverted and saved us from the fulsome entertainment of an ill-bred coxcomb; and the bride drank the lieutenant's health. We returned to my lodging, and Tranquillus led his wife to her apartment, without the ceremony of throwing the stocking.

N° 80. THURSDAY, OCTOBER 13, 1709. Quicquid agunt homines

-nostri est farrago libelli.-Juv. Sat. i. 85, 86.

Whatever good is done, whatever, ill—

By human kind, shall this collection fill.

THI

Grecian Coffee-house, October 12.

HIS learned board has complained to me of the exorbitant price of late years put upon books, and consequently on learning, which has raised the reward demanded by learned men for their advice and labour. In order to regulate and fix a standard in these matters, divines, physicians, and lawyers, have sent in large proposals, which

are of great light and instruction. From the perusal of these memorials, I am come to this immediate resolution, until I have leisure to treat the matter at large, viz. In divinity, fathers shall be valued according to their antiquity; schoolmen by the pound weight; and sermons by their goodness. In my own profession, which is mostly physic, authors shall be rated according to their language. The Greek is so rarely understood, and the English so well, I judge them of no value: so that only Latin shall bear a price, and that too according to its purity, and as it serves best for prescription. In law, the value must be set according to the intricacy and obscurity of the author and blackness of the letter; provided always that the binding be of calves-skin. This method I shall settle also with relation to all other writings; insomuch that even these our lucubrations, though hereafter printed by Aldus, Elzevir, or Stevens, shall not advance above one single penny.

White's Chocolate-house, October 12.

It will be allowed me, that I have all along shewed great respect in matters which concern the fair sex; but the inhumanity with which the author of the following letter has been used is not to be suffered.

"SIR,

October 9.

"Yesterday I had the misfortune to drop in at my Lady Haughty's, upon her visiting-day. When I entered the room where she receives company, they all stood up indeed; but they stood as if they were to stare at rather ́than to receive me. After a long pause, a servant brought a round stool, on which I sat down at the lower end of the room, in the presence of no less than twelve persons, gentlemen and ladies, lolling in elbow-chairs. And, to complete my disgrace, my mistress was of the society. I tried to compose myself in vain, not knowing how to dispose of either legs or arms, nor how to shape my countenance; the eyes of the whole room being still upon me in a profound silence. My confusion at last was so great, that, without speaking, or being spoken to, I fled for it, and left the assembly to treat me at their discretion. A lecture from you upon these inhuman distinctions in a free nation, will, I doubt not, prevent the like evils for the fu

ture, and make it, as we say, as cheap sitting as standing. I am, with the greatest respect, Sir,

Your most humble and most obedient servant, "J. R.

"P. S.-I had almost forgot to inform you, that a fair young lady sat in an armless chair at my right hand, with manifest discontent in her locks."

Soon after the receipt of this epistle, I heard a very gentle knock at my door: my maid went down and brought up word, "that a tall, lean, black man, well dressed, who said he had not the honour to be acquainted with me, desired to be admitted." I bid her shew him up, met him at my chamber-door, and then fell back a few paces. He approached me with great respect, and told me, with a low voice, "he was the gentleman that had been seated upon the round stool." I immediately recollected that there was a joint-stool in my chamber, which I was afraid he might take for an instrument of distinction, and therefore winked at my boy to carry it into my closet. I then took him by the hand, and led him to the upper end of my room, where I placed him in my great elbow-chair; at the same time drawing another without arms to it, for myself to sit by him. I then asked him, "at what time this misfortune befel him?" He answered, "between the hours of seven and eight in the evening." I farther demanded of him, what he had eat or drank that day? he replied, nothing but a dish of water-gruel with a few plums in it." In the next place, I felt his pulse, which was very low and languishing. These circumstances confirmed me in an opinion, which I had entertained upon the first reading of this letter, that the gentleman was far gone in the spleen. I, therefore, advised him to rise the next morning, and plunge into the cold-bath, there to remain under water until he was almost drowned. This I ordered him to repeat six days successively; and on the seventh to repair at the wonted hour to my Lady Haughty's, and to acquaint me afterward with what he shall meet with there and particularly to tell me, whether he shall think they stared upon him so much as the time before. The gentleman smiled; and by his way of talking to me, shewed himself a man of excellent sense in all particulars, unless when a cane-chair, a round or a joint-stool, were spoken of. He

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opened his heart to me at the same time concerning several other grievances; such as, being overlooked in public assemblies, having his bows unanswered, being helped last at table, and placed at the back part of a coach; with many other distresses, which have withered his countenance, and wore him to a skeleton. Finding him a man of reason, I entered into the bottom of his distemper. "Sir," said I," there are more of your constitution in this island of Great Britain, than in any other part of the world; and I beg the favour of you to tell me, whether you do not observe that you meet with most affronts in rainy days?" He answered candidly, "that he had long observed, that people were less saucy in sunshine than in cloudy weather." Upon which I told him plainly, "his distemper was the spleen; and that though the world was very ill-natured, it was not so bad as he believed it." I farther assured him, "that his use of the cold-bath, with a course of steel which I should prescribe him, would certainly cure most of his acquaintance of their rudeness, ill-behaviour, and impertinence. My patient smiled, and promised to observe my prescriptions, not forgetting to give me an account of their operation. This distemper being pretty epidemical, I shall, for the benefit of mankind, give the public an account of the progress I make in the cure of it.

From my own Apartment, October 12.

The author of the following letter behaves himself so ingenuously, that I cannot defer answering him any longer. "HONOURED SIR,

October 6.

"I have lately contracted a very honest and undissembled claudication in my left foot, which will be a double affliction to me, if, according to your Tatler of this day, it must pass upon the world for a piece of singularity and affectation. I must, therefore, humbly beg leave to limp along the streets after my own way, or I shall be inevitably ruined in coach-hire. As soon as I am tolerably recovered, I promise to walk as upright as a ghost in a tragedy, being not of a stature to spare an inch of height that I can any way pretend to. I honour your lucubrations, and am, with the most profound submission,

"Honoured Sir,

"Your most dutiful and most obedient servant, &c."