"The keeper immediately set all in order again for another customer, which happened to be a famous prude, whom her parents after long threatenings, and much persuasion, had with the extremest difficulty prevailed on to accept a young handsome goldsmith, that might have pretended to five times her fortune. The fathers and mothers in the neighbourhood used to quote her for an example to their daughters. Her elbows were rivetted to her sides, and her whole person so ordered as to inform everybody that she was afraid they should touch her. She only dreaded to approach the lion, because it was a he one, and abhorred to think an animal of that sex should presume to breathe on her. The sight of a man at twenty yards distance made her draw back her head. She always sat upon the farther corner of the chair, though there were six chairs between her and her lover, and with the door wide open, and her little sister in the room. She was never saluted but at the tip of her ear, and her father had much ado to make her dine without her gloves, when there was a man at table. She entered the den with some fear, which we took to proceed from the height of her modesty, offended at the sight of so many men in the gallery. The lion beholding her at a distance, immediately gave the deadly sign; at which the poor creature (methinks I see her still) miscarried in a fright before us all. The lion seemed to be surprised as much as we, and gave her time to make her confession, 'That she was four months gone, by the foreman of her father's shop, that this was her third big belly;' and when her friends asked, why she would venture the trial? she said, 'Her nurse assured her, that a lion would never hurt a woman with child.'" Upon this I immediately waked, and could not help wishing, that the deputy-censors of my late institution were endued with the same instinct as these parish-lions were. [Footnote 1: "Manditque, trahitque Molle pecus." _Aeneid_, ix. 340-341. "Devours and tears the peaceful flock." [T.S.]] [Footnote 2: _I.e._ 1710-11. [T.S.]] THE TATLER, NUMB. 298.[1] _Ingenuas didicisse fideliter artes, Emollit mores._ OVID.[2] FROM SATURDAY MARCH 3. TO TUESDAY MARCH 6. 1710.[3] _From my own Apartment in Channel-Row, March 5_.