desty, and assist his patron against the importunity of other pretenders, by a proper affurance in his own vindication. He says it is a civil cowardice to be backward in afserting what you ought to expect, as it is a military fear to be flow in attacking when it is your duty. With this candour does the Gentleman speak of himself and others. The fame frankness runs through all his conversation. The military part of his life has furnished him with many adventures, in the relation of which he is very agreeable to the company; for he is never overbearing, though accustomed to command men in the utmost degree below him; nor ever too obsequious, from an habit of obeying men highly above him. But that our fociety may not appear a fet of humourists, unacquainted with the gallantries and pleasures of the age, we have among us the gallant Will Honeycomb; a Gentleman who according to his years should be in the decline of his life; but having ever been very careful of his person, and always had a very eafy fortune, time has made but a very little impreffion, either by wrinkles on his forehead, or traces in his brain. His person is well turned, of a good height. He is very ready at that fort of discourse with which men usually entertain women. He has all his life dressed very well, and remembers habits as others do men. He can finile when one speaks to him, and laughs easily. He knows the history of every mode, and can inform you from which of the French king's wenches our wives and daughters had this manner of curling their hair, that way of placing their hoods; whose frailty was covered by fuch a fort of petticoat, and whose vanity to shew her foot made that part of the dress so short in such a year. In a word, all his conversation and knowledge have been in the female world. As other men of his age will take notice to you what fuch a minister said upon fuch and fuch an occafion; he will tell you, when the Duke of Monmouth danced at court, fuch a woman was then smitten; another was taken with him at the head of his troop in the Park. In all these important relations, he has ever about the fame time received a kind glance or a blow of a fan from fome celecelebrated beauty, mother of the present Lord fuch-aone. If you fspeak of a young commoner that faid a lively thing in the house, he starts up, " He has good "blood in his veins; Tom Mirabell begot him; the 66 rogue cheated me in that affair, that young fellow's "mother ufed me more like a dog, than any woman " I ever made advances to." This way of talking of his very much enlivens the converfation among us of a more fedate turn; and I find there is not one of the company, but myself, who rarely speak at all, but fpeaks of him as of that fort of man who is ufually called a well-bred fine Gentleman. To conclude his character, where women are not concerned, he is an honest worthy man. I cannot tell whether I am to account him, whom I am next to speak of, as one of our company; for he vifits us but feldom, but, when he does, it adds to every man else a new enjoyment of himself. He is a clergyman, a very philofophick man, of general learning, great fanctity of life, and the most exact good-breeding. He has the misfortune to be of a very weak conftitution, and confequently cannot accept of fuch cares and bufiness as preferments in his function would oblige him to; he is therefore among divines what a chamber-counfellor is among lawyers. The probity of his mind, and the integrity of his life, create him followers; as being eloquent or loud advances others. He feldom introduces the fubject he speaks upon; but we are fo far gone in years, that he observes when he is among us, an earneftness to have him fall on fome divine topic, which he always treats with much authority, as one who has no interests in this world, as one who is haftening to the object of all his wishes, and conceives hope from his decays and infirmities. These are my ordinary companions. R Saturday, N° 3. Saturday, March 3. Et quoi quisque ferè studio devinctus adhæret, LUCR. 1. 4. v. 959 What studies please, what most delight, And fill mens thoughts, they dream them o'er at night. CREECH. I N one of my late rambles, or rather speculations, I looked into the great hall where the bank is kept, and was not a little pleased to fee the directors, fecretaries, and clerks, with all the other members of that wealthy corporation, ranged in their several stations, according to the parts they act in that just and regular economy. This revived in my memory the many dif courses which I had both read and heard concerning the decay of public credit, with the methods of restoring it, and which, in my opinion, have always been defective, because they have always been made with an eye to separate interests, and party principles. The thoughts of the day gave my mind employment for the whole night, so that I fell insensibly into a kind of methodical dream, which disposed all my contempla. tions into a vision or allegory, or what else the reader shall please to call it. Methought I returned to the great hall, where I had been the morning before, but, to my surprise, instead of the company that I left there, I faw, towards the upper end of the hall, a beautiful virgin, seated on a throne of gold. Her name (as they told me) was Public Credit. The walls, instead of being adorned with pictures and maps, were hung with many acts of parliament written in golden letters. At the upper end of the hall was the Magna Charta, with the act act of uniformity on the right hand, and the act of toleration on the left. At the lower end of the hall was the act of Settlement, which was placed füll in the eye of the virgin that fat upon the throne. Both the fides of the hall were covered with such acts of parliament as had been made for the establishment of public funds. The Lady seemed to fet an unfpeakable value upon these several pieces of furniture, infomuch that the often refreshed her eye with them, and often fimiled with a fecret pleasure as the looked upon them; but, at the fame time, shewed a very particular uneafiness, if the faw any thing approaching that might hurt them. She appeared indeed infinitely timorous in all her behaviour: and, whether it was from the delicacy of her conftitution, or that she was troubled with vapours, as I was afterwards told by one who I found was none of her well-wishers, the changed colour, and startled at every thing the heard. She was likewife (as I afterwards found) a greater valetudinarian than any I had ever met with even in her own fex, and subject to fuch momentary confumptions, that, in the twinkling of an eye, she would fall away from the most florid complexion, and the most healthful ftate of body, and wither into a skeleton. Her recoveries were often as fudden as her decays, infomuch that she would revive in a moment out of a wasting distemper into a habit of the highest health and vigour. I had very foon an opportunity of observing these quick turns and changes in her conftitution. There fat at her feet a couple of fecretaries, who received every hour letters from all parts of the world, which the one or the other of them was perpetually reading to her; and, according to the news the heard, to which she was exceedingly attentive, she changed colour, and difcovered many symptoms of health or fickness. Behind the throne was a prodigious heap of bags of money, which were piled upon one another so high that they touched the cieling. The floor, on her right hand and on her left, was covered with vast sums of gold that rose up in pyramids on either fide of her: but this I did not so much wonder at, when I heard, upon inquiry, that she had the same virtue in her touch, which the poets tell us a Lydian king was formerly pofsessed of; and that she could convert whatever she pleased into that precious metal. a After little dizziness, and confused hurry of thought, which a man often meets with in a dream, methought the hall was alarmed, the doors flew open, and there entered half a dozen of the most hideous phantoms that I had ever seen, even in a dream, before that time. They came in two by two, though matched in the most dissociable manner, and mingled together in a kind of dance. It would be tedious to describe their habits and persons; for which reason, I shall only inform my reader that the first couple were Tyranny and Anarchy, the fecond were Bigotry and Atheism, the third, the Genius of a Commonwealth, and a young man of about twenty-two years of age, whose name I could not learn. He had a sword in his right hand, which in the dance he often brandished at the Act of Settlement; and a citizen, who stood by me, whispered in my ear, that he saw a sponge in his left hand. The dance of so many jarring natures put me in mind of the fun, moon, and earth, in the Rehearsal, that danced together for no other end but to eclipse one another. The Reader will eafily suppose, by what has been before faid, that the Lady on the throne would have been almost frighted to distraction, had she seen but any one of these spectres; what then must have been her condition when the faw them all in a body? She fainted and died away at the fight; Et neque jam color eft misto candore rubori; Nec corpus remanet Ovid. Met. 1. 3. v. 491. Her spirits faint, Her blooming cheeks affume a palid teint, And scarce her form remains. There was as great a change in the hill of moneybags, and the heaps of money, the former shrinking and falling into so many empty bags, that I now found not above a tenth part of them had been filled with money. The reft that took up the same space, and made the |