This danger vanishing, Mrs. Tattle presently, with a rueful length of face, and formal preface, “hesitated to assure Mrs. Montague, that she was greatly distressed about her daughter Sophy; that she was convinced her lungs were affected; and that she certainly ought to drink the waters morning and evening; and above all things, must keep one of the patirosa lozenges constantly in her mouth, and directly consult Dr. Cardamum, the best physician in the world, and the person she would send for herself upon her death-bed; because, to her certain knowledge, he had recovered a young lady, a relation of her own, after she had lost one whole _globe_ {222} of her lungs.” The medical opinion of a lady of so much anatomical precision could not have much weight. Neither was this universal adviser more successful in an attempt to introduce a tutor to Frederick, who, she apprehended, must want some one to perfect him in the Latin and Greek, and dead languages, of which, she observed, it would be impertinent for a woman to talk; only she might venture to repeat what she had heard said by good authority, that a competency of the dead tongues could be had nowhere but at a public school, or else from a private tutor who had been abroad (after the advantage of a classical education, finished in one of the universities) with a good family; without which introduction it was idle to think of reaping solid advantages from any continental tour; all which requisites, from personal knowledge, she could aver to be concentrated in the gentleman she had the honour to recommend, as having been tutor to a young nobleman, who had now no further occasion for him, having, unfortunately for himself and his family, been killed in an untimely duel. All Mrs. Theresa Tattle’s suggestions being lost upon these stoical parents, her powers were next tried upon the children, and her success soon became apparent. On Sophy, indeed, she could not make any impression, though she had expended on her some of her finest strokes of flattery. Sophy, though very desirous of the approbation of her friends, was not very desirous of winning the favour of strangers. She was about thirteen—that dangerous age at which ill educated girls, in their anxiety to display their accomplishments, are apt to become dependent for applause upon the praise of every idle visitor; when the habits not being formed, and the attention being suddenly turned to dress and manners, girls are apt to affect and imitate, indiscriminately, everything that they conceive to be agreeable.