Their conversation was a routine of insipid frivolity and angry disputes. With no definite principles of economy or of morals, he wasted his fortune and wrecked his health over the bottle and at cards--excitements, the usual resource of a weak, ill-cultivated understanding. She is now a widow, scantily endowed, at the age of twenty-seven. Her mind, too much engrossed by her darling pursuit to have learned, even in the impressive school of adversity, is nearly a blank as to all useful knowledge: imagination, paramount there over every other faculty, is prolific of innumerable fooleries; she can do no work beyond crimping a ruff or making a frill: and her nerves, _shattered_ by tea, late hours, and sentimental emotion at fictitious scenes, threaten a disordered intellect and a premature grave. To this impertinent adage, about _example_ and _precept_, is it chiefly owing that I am at this moment a bachelor, aged fifty. I used it to parry the repeated instances made me by a friendly senior bachelor, to be "up and a doing," in the journey towards matrimony. As the proverb commonly silenced him, it appeared to me at last, as it does to most people, a satisfactory answer; it was the lullaby, with which I hushed into repose every transient qualm that his expostulations excited. My friend at length, in reasonable time, took me at my word, and added example to precept: he married, well and happily. But one obstacle or other, real or imaginary, had by this time confirmed me in my inactivity. Business occupied my time: chimerical visions of female excellence, in spite of my better reason, haunted me from the regions of romance, and made me hard to be pleased, even by merits which I was obliged to confess were superior to my own: courtship, by being long in view yet long deferred, came at length to appear clothed in embarrassment and terror: a failure, resulting (as vanity whispered,) purely from the awkwardness produced by embarrassment and terror, finally crushed all matrimonial aspirations: and, as it is now absurd to hope for a _love-match_, (a genuine novel-reader can brook no other) I am e'en trying to resign myself to the doom of perpetual celibacy. 'Twere needless to multiply examples. These suffice to shew, not only how absurd in reasoning, but how hurtful often in practice it is, to consider advice as at all the _less good_, for not being enforced by the giver's example. That proverb has done as much harm in the world as the doctrine of the Pope's infallibility, or of the divine right of kings; or as the silly saying, "_stuff a cold, and starve a fever;_" or, as (by its perversion) that unfortunate one, "_spare the rod, and spoil the child._"