of them ever treated me decently? I hate married women! Do they not hate
me? and, simply because I smoke, try to draw their husbands away from
my society? I hate dowagers! Have I not cause? Does not every dowager in
London point to George Fitz-Boodle as to a dissolute wretch whom young
and old should avoid?

And yet do not imagine that I have not loved. I have, and madly, many,
many times! I am but eight-and-thirty,* not past the age of passion, and
may very likely end by running off with an heiress--or a cook-maid
(for who knows what strange freaks Love may choose to play in his own
particular person? and I hold a man to be a mean creature who calculates
about checking any such sacred impulse as lawful love)--I say, though
despising the sex in general for their conduct to me, I know of
particular persons belonging to it who are worthy of all respect and
esteem, and as such I beg leave to point out the particular young lady
who is perusing these lines. Do not, dear madam, then imagine that if
I knew you I should be disposed to sneer at you. Ah, no! Fitz-Boodle's
bosom has tenderer sentiments than from his way of life you would fancy,
and stern by rule is only too soft by practice. Shall I whisper to you
the story of one or two of my attachments? All terminating fatally
(not in death, but in disappointment, which, as it occurred, I used
to imagine a thousand times more bitter than death, but from which one
recovers somehow more readily than from the other-named complaint)--all,
I say, terminating wretchedly to myself, as if some fatality pursued my
desire to become a domestic character.

* He is five-and-forty, if he is a day old.--O. Y.

My first love--no, let us pass THAT over. Sweet one! thy name shall
profane no hireling page. Sweet, sweet memory! Ah, ladies, those