—It was a week before I recovered from the shock of such an alaram. But on more mature thought, (especially when I came coolly to reflect on some recent dangers through which I had myself passed in triumph, as well as on the numberless instances in which I had felt symptoms of the same disorder,) I began to consider your case as far from hopeless. We become more liable to these attacks as we advance in life, and I warn you of being constantly on your guard against them. I also beg leave to recommend exercise and change of scene as the most effectual cure. I am fully persuaded that had not fortune made us all travellers, we should long since have ceased to be the independent beings we are. Waller spoke, in his last letter, of a Venetian beauty, in language that seemed ominous; but I know too well that deep inward eccentricity of the man, which he so prettily calls mauvaise honte, to dread any thing serious from the affair. I think his eminently impartial manner of viewing things, will for ever save him from the sin of matrimony.

Besides, the girl is only descended from two doges of the fifteenth century, and four or five old admirals of the thirteenth and fourteenth, a genealogy that surely cannot pretend to compete with the descent of a Somersetshire baronet, whose great grandfather was an alderman of Lincoln, and whose great grandmother was the youngest daughter of a British officer.