“Hark ye, Frederic!” he began; “all young men are fools--very well! Some are more fools than others; there are degrees of comparison, but all are fools--very well! You I hold to be particularly and peculiarly a fool; no fault of mine--very well! Now you have been for the last two years pestering me with ravings and reveries about every pretty face that fell in your way; verses you have written, and they are my abomination--very well! I have found stanzas to Chloe in my shaving-pot, and sonnets to Araminta in the blank leaves of the Annual Registers--very well! You are going to-day to my cousin Sir Andrew’s; nobody to fall in love with there--too sensible a man; insists on a crooked nose in his laundress, and prefers a humpback to a ten years’ character in his choice of a dairymaid--very well! But hark you, sir! you may meet, at some of those hotbeds of frivolity and fevers, which are called card-parties, routs, balls, and I know not what beside--I say, sir, you may meet a girl called Adèle Lepicq--a fantastical name forsooth, but ladies are as fine now in their appellations as they are in their costume--very well! What’s in a name? I tell you, Frederic, if ever you mean to play the fool to any purpose, fall in love with that girl. Why, sir, she is rich enough to buy up the Bank of England--to keep even a ballad-monger from starving! Talk of beauty--sentiment--- affection! What are these to a rent-roll like hers? I tell you, a shape is as well set off by Mechlin lace as by brown holland; and a white neck is mere moonshine, till it has a diamond necklace about it. Bah!--very well!” So spoke my revered relation, and the impression produced on my mind was that which similar speeches have produced on similar minds ever since old men were arbitrary and young men wilful. I sell myself for gold! I barter the first flush of the young heart’s emotion for what in poetry was always trash! I bend my knees to awkwardness or ugliness! I bow in adoration to malice and insipidity! I set off, however, and found the stage which was to be my conveyance occupied by a fox-hunter and a brace of Militia officers, who were discussing the case of a poor man, named, for his sins, John Smith. He had been severely wounded in a duel. I listened with great interest to the usual interesting details--the chaises ordered at five in the morning; the vain attempt at a reconciliation; the ground measured; the surgeon in attendance; the firing, the dropping; the deep regret of the antagonist; the absconding; the apprehension of danger. All this was very well; but when, after going through the action, they proceeded to investigate the cause, what was my astonishment at finding that all this, which was to engross conversation for a week and fill the newspapers for a month, was occasioned by the fascinations of Adèle Lepicq!