pliment you upon your birth, perfon, or fortune; nor any other the like perfections, which you poffefs whether you will or no; but thall only touch upon those which are of your own acquiring, and in which every one muft allow you have a real merit.

YOUR janty air and easy motion, the volubility of your difcourfe, the fuddenness of your laugh, the management of your fnuff. box, with the whiteness of your hands and teeth, (which have juftly gained you the envy of the most polite part of the male world, and the love of the greatest beauties in the female) are entirely to be afcribed to your own perfonal genius and application.

You are formed for thefe accomplishments by a happy turn of nature, and have finifhed yourself in them by the utmoft improvements. of art. A man that is defective in either of thefe qualifications (whatever may be the fecret ambition of his heart) must never hope to make the figure you have done among the fafhionable

fashionable part of his fpecies. It is therefore no wonder we fee fuch multitudes of afpiring young men fall fhort of you in all these beauties of your character, notwithstanding. the study and practice of them is the whole. bufinefs of their lives. But I need not tell you that the free and difingaged behaviour of a fine gentleman makes as many aukward beaux, as the eafinefs of your favourite Waller hath made infipid poets.

AT prefent you are content to aim all your charms at your own fpoufe, without further thought of mifchief to any others of the fex. I know you had formerly a very great contempt for that pedantic race of mortals who call themselves philofophers; and yet, to your honour be it fpoken, there is not a fage of them all could have better acted up to their precepts in one of the most important points. of life I mean in the generous difregard of popular opinion, which you fhewed fome years ago, when you chofe for your wife an obfcure young woman, who doth not indeed pretend

A 3

to antient family, but has certainly as many forefathers as any lady in the land, if she could but reckon up their names.

I MUST Own I conceived very extraordi nary hopes of you from the moment that you confeffed your age, and from eight and forty (where you had ftuck fo many years) very ingenuously stepped into your grand climacteric.. Your deportment has fince been very venerable and becoming. If I am rightly informed, you make a regular appearance every quarter feffions among your brethren of the quorum; and, if things go on as they do, ftand fair for being a colonel of the militia. I am told that your time paffes away, as agreeably in the amusements of a country life, as it e-ver did in the gallantries of the town and that you now take as much pleasure in the planting of young trees, as you did formerly in cutting down of your old ones. In short, we hear from all hands that you are tho roughly reconciled to your dirty acres, and have not too much wit to look into your own eftate.

AFTER

AFTER having fpoken thus much of my patron, I must take the privilege of an author in saying fomething of myself. I fhall therefore beg leave to add, that I have purpofely omitted fetting those marks to the end of every paper, which appeared in my former volumes, that you may have an oppor-tunity of fhewing Mrs Honeycomb the fhrewdnefs of your conjectures, by afcribing every fpeculation to its proper author: tho' you know how often many profound critics in ftile and fentiments have very judiciously er ed in this particular, before they were let into the fecret.. Lam, SIR,

Your roft faithful humble fervant,

THE SPECTATOR.

THE

BOOKSELLER TO THE READER.

N the fix hundred and thirty fecond Spectator, the rea

I have not been able to prevail upon the feveral gentlemen who were concerned in this work to let me acquaint the world with their names.

Perhaps it will be unneceffary to inform the reader, that no other papers, which have appeared under the title of Spectator, fince the clofing of this eighth volume, were written by any of those gentlemen who had a hand in this or the former volumes.