all I feared, your being apprehended and sent into _France_, your delivering yourself up, your abandoning me; all, all I had an easy faith for, without consulting more than that thou wert gone--that very word yet strikes a terror to my soul, disables my trembling hand, and I must wait for reinforcements from some kinder thoughts. But, oh! From whence should they arrive? From what dear present felicity, or prospect of a future, though never so distant, and all those past ones serve but to increase my pain; they favour me no more, they charm and please no more, and only present themselves to my memory to complete the number of my sighs and tears, and make me wish that they had never been, though even with _Philander_? Oh! say, thou monarch of my panting soul, how hast thou treated _Sylvia_, to make her wish that she had never known a tender joy with thee? Is it possible she should repent her loving thee, and thou shouldst give her cause! Say, dear false charmer, is it? But oh, there is no lasting faith in sin!----Ah--What have I done? How dreadful is the scene of my first debauch, and how glorious that never to be regained prospect of my virgin innocence, where I sat enthroned in awful virtue, crowned with shining honour, and adorned with unsullied reputation, till thou, O tyrant _Love_, with a charming usurpation invaded all my glories; and which I resigned with greater pride and joy than a young monarch puts them on. Oh! Why then do I repent? As if the vast, the dear expense of pleasures past were not enough to recompense for all the pains of love to come? But why, oh why do I treat thee as a lover lost already? Thou art not, canst not; no, I will not believe it, till thou thyself confess it: nor shall the omission of a tender word or two make me believe thou hast forgot thy vows. Alas, it may be I mistake thy cares, thy hard fatigues of life, thy present ill circumstances (and all the melancholy effects of thine and my misfortunes) for coldness and declining love. Alas, I had forgot my poor my dear _Philander_ is now obliged to contrive for life as well as love, thou perhaps (fearing the worst) are preparing eloquence for a council table; and in thy busy and guilty imaginations haranguing it to the grave judges, defending thy innocence, or evading thy guilt: feeing advocates, excepting juries, and confronting witnesses, when thou shouldst be giving satisfaction to my fainting love-sick heart: sometimes in thy labouring fancy the horror of a dreadful sentence for an ignominious death, strikes upon thy tender soul with a force that frights the little god from thence, and I am persuaded there are some moments of this melancholy nature, wherein your _Sylvia_ is even quite forgotten, and this too she can think just and reasonable, without reproaching thy heart with a declining passion, especially when I am not by to call thy fondness up, and divert thy more tormenting hours: but oh,