There is good reason to believe that her lively ladyship speaks here your own sentiments, but what you can understand by sacred poesy is, I confess, above my comprehension. Does it consist in celestial ballads, holy madrigals, spiritual garlands, or bellmen’s verses? for I hardly know any other species of sacred poesy in our language, our religion being the most unpoetical in the world; so that a sacred subject can never appear with any grace, dignity, or beauty in a poem. I have already declared my opinion very explicitely about amorous writers, whether in prose or verse; but if the sentence which the _dear flighty creature_ passes upon them all, without distinction, could have been executed, what must have become of her good friend Mr. Samuel Richardson. He too is a poet, for though he does not write in verse, yet he draws characters, and deals in fiction, and is besides one of the most amorous poets in the world; he does not indeed paint a Chloe or a Sachurissa in an ivy bower, or a shady grove, there is something of delicacy in that; but he represents all the preparations to the good work, and the good work itself, going forward, in a downright honest manner, among whores and rakes, in brothels and bagnios. He not only raises the passions, but kindly points out the readiest and the easiest way to lay them. That man must have a very philosophical constitution, indeed, who does not find himself moved by several descriptions, particularly that luscious one, which Bob Lovelace gives of Clarissa’s person, when he makes the attempt on her virtue, after the adventure of the fire. Not that I think any genius is required for such an atchievement; nature, with the least hint, is more than sufficient for the purpose; few good writers have attempted such things, and the very worst have succeeded. However, the passions of the reader being now raised, his next business is to satisfy them; and he cannot but reflect that this virtuous scene passes in a brothel, where, though Clarissa may be impregnable, unless a dose of opium be first administered, there are such girls as Sally Martin and Polly Horton; but they not being _every man’s girls_, as Bob Lovelace tells us, and our adventurer, perhaps, not having money, address, or patience, to come to the _ultimatum_ with those first-rate ladies of pleasure, he very sagely concludes, that one woman is as good as another, especially as the same Bob Lovelace, so experienced in the ways of women, informs him, that _that prime gift differs only in its external customary visibles_, and that _the skull of Philip is no better than another man’s_, he very contentedly resolves to take up with Dorcas Wykes, or the first _ready non-apparent_ he can meet with in _the outer house_. Accordingly our amorous youth sallies forth, fully bent to enjoy Clarissa in imagination; but before he has got half way to mother Sinclair’s, he meets a pretty girl in the streets, who invites him to a glass of wine, and the next