You say my _wife_ she _cannot_ be--and my mistress! perish the thought! What! I repay the generosity of the father by the destruction of the child! I steal this angelic being from the peaceful security of her native shades, with all her ardent, tender feelings thick upon her: I, ‘“Crop this fair rose, and rifle all its sweetness!” No; you do me but common justice when you say, that though you have sometimes known me _affect_ the character of a libertine, yet never, even for a moment, have you known me forfeit that of a man of honour. I would not be understood to speak in the mere commonplace worldly acceptation of the word, but literally, according to the text of moral and divine laws. “Then, what,” you ask me, “is the aim, the object, in pursuing this _ignus fatuus_ of the heart and fancy?” In a word, then, virtue is my object--felicity my aim; or, rather, I am lured towards the former through the medium of the latter. And whether the tie which binds me at once to moral and physical good, is a fragile texture and transient existence, or whether it will become “close twisted with the fibres of the heart, and breaking break it,” time only can determine--to time, therefore, I commit my fate; but while thus led by the hand of virtue, I inebriate at the living spring of bliss; “While reeling through a wilderness of joy,” can you wonder that I fling off the goading chain of prudence, and, in daring to be _free_, at once be virtuous and happy. My father’s letter is brief, but pithy. My brother is married, and has sold his name and _title_ for a hundred thousand pounds; and _his_ brother has a chance of selling his happiness forever for something about the same sum. And who think you, is to be the purchaser? Why our old sporting friend D--------. In my last grousing visit at his seat, you may remember the _pert_ little girl, his only daughter, who, he assured us, was that day _unkennelled_ for the first time, in honour of our success, and who rushed upon us from the nursery in all the bloom of fifteen, and all the boldness of a hoyden; whose society was the house-keeper, and the chamber-maid, whose ideas of pleasure extended no farther than a blind-man’s-buff in the servant’s hall, and a game of hot cockles with the butler and footman in the pantry. I had the good fortune to touch her heart at cross-purposes, and completely vanquished her affection by a romping match in the morning; and so it seems the fair _susceptible_ has pined in thought ever since, but not “let concealment prey on her damask cheek,” for she told her love to an old maiden aunt, who told it to another confidential friend, until the whole neighbourhood was full of the tale of the _victim of constancy_ and the _fatal deceiver_.