beauty and adventurous spirit. He was indeed already a beau and
conqueror of female hearts. It was suspected that he cherished a private
ambition to set the modes in beauties and embroidered waistcoats himself
in time, and be as renowned abroad and as much the town talk as certain
other celebrated beaux had been before him. The art of ogling tenderly
and of uttering soft nothings he had learned during his first season in
town, and as he had a great melting blue eye, the figure of an Adonis,
and a white and shapely hand for a ring, he was well equipped for
conquest. He had darted many an inflaming glance at Mistress Clorinda
before the first meats were removed. Even in London he had heard a vague
rumour of this handsome young woman, bred among her father's dogs,
horses, and boon companions, and ripening into a beauty likely to make
town faces pale. He had almost fallen into the spleen on hearing that
she had left her boy's clothes and vowed she would wear them no more, as
above all things he had desired to see how she carried them and what
charms they revealed. On hearing from his host and kinsman that she had
said that on her birth-night she would bid them farewell for ever by
donning them for the last time, he was consumed with eagerness to obtain
an invitation. This his kinsman besought for him, and, behold! the first
glance the beauty shot at him pierced his inflammable bosom like a dart.
Never before had it been his fortune to behold female charms so dazzling
and eyes of such lustre and young majesty. The lovely baggage had a
saucy way of standing with her white jewelled hands in her pockets like a
pretty fop, and throwing up her little head like a modish beauty who was
of royal blood; and these two tricks alone, he felt, might have set on
fire the heart of a man years older and colder than himself.

If she had been of the order of soft-natured charmers, they would have
fallen into each other's eyes before the wine was changed; but this
Mistress Clorinda was not. She did not fear to meet the full battery of