clear head, a strong memory, and clean limbs, || these are nature's furniture to a man of an untainted race. But how often are all these original beauties, the native attendants upon youth and a good constitution, made to droop and flag, while paleness and leanness come into the face, heaviness into the heart, and dulness into the head. How is the shining sparkling of the eye eclipsed, the understanding lost, the memory decayed, and the genius, partaking of the contagion, entirely altered?

"The glory of a young man is his strength," says Solomon, Prov. xx, 29, and one of his first advices after that expression is, "Give not thy strength unto women;" it is true, Solomon there means to a strange woman, that is to say, a whore. But with some abatement for the person only, and for the circumstances spoken to here, the thing is, otherwise, the same, and the excesses are in their degree, though perhaps not every way as fatal.

It was a late learned physician who said, that the women wearing hoops would make the next age all cripples; that drinking tea would make them rheumatic; that taking snuff would make them lunatic: to which it was said, by way of repartee, the doctor being a little of a libertine, that the levity of the present times will make the next age atheists; the cavilling at scripture, which is now the grand mode, make them here. tics; and the talking nonsense make them all fools and now, I think, I may with equal propriety add, that the vice of this age will make the next age rotten.

:

kind to live, at least like reasonable creatures, if not as christians.

The answer to this would be direct, if laws and government were concerned in it. But as we complain of an evil which the sense of God's laws, nor the force of human laws, will not reach, nothing of force, nothing of putting statutes in execution, nothing of the hand of the magistrate can be thought of use, or, if it be, will be equally laughed at. Indeed, how should they that can argue themselves out of all the restraints of virtue and religion, be expected to be under any restraints, except those of power?

And this makes me have recourse to satire, and the reproofs and lashes of the pen. These are the proper weapons to combat this adversary: where the laws of God or man have no effect, the satire has been sometimes known to reach the affections and passions of men; as they run in several channels, so they are to be come at by several methods; ways and means for one thing will not be always ways and means for another; as men are wrought upon, some by one thing, some by another, according to the several tempers and dispositions which govern them, and in which they act; so, in general, they are moved, some in one way, some in another.

National mistakes, vulgar errors, and even a general practice, have been reformed by a just satire. None of our countrymen have been known to boast of being "True-born Englishmen," or so much as to use the word as a title or appellation ever since a late satire upon that national folly was published, though almost forty years ago. Nothing was more frequent in our mouths before that, nothing so universally blushed for and laughed at since. The time, I believe, is yet to come, that any author printed it, or that any man of sense spoke it in earnest; whereas, before, you had it in the best writers, and in the most florid speeches, before the most august assemblies, upon the most solemn occasions.

It is the like in the contamination of blood: the fatal progression shows itself there, as well as in other parts. Excesses weaken the body, sink nature, darken the countenance, stupify the brain; to-day they reach the body, to-morrow the soul, and, in the next age, the race.

The lawful things of this age will make the next age lawless; their fathers conveyed blood, and they convey poison; our parents handed on health, and we diseases; our children are born in palaces, and are like to die in hospitals. Debauchery is the parent of distemper; fire in the blood makes a frost in the brain; and be the pleasures lawful or unlawful, the effect of folly is to leave a generation of fools.

It would be happy, if after having said thus much in general, and after having entered so seriously into all the particulars by which a lewd generation defile and pollute the marriage bed, and ruin both themselves and their posterity, could propose some effectual method for the suppressing the wicked practices, and bring man

I

ing lewdly, be hissed out of the world by a just satire; could it be lashed off the stage of life by the pen, happy would the author be that could boast of such success.

Could all the third chapter, and the fourth chapter, and the fifth, and seventh, and ninth, and eleventh chapter-crimes, be met with in the same manner, and with the same success, I should think this, however difficult, the best and happiest undertaking that ever came into, or went out of, my hands.

I cannot desire a greater scope in any subject, that calls for censure among men; I think I may say, I must have all the wise, the religious, the modest part of mankind with me, in the reproof. The crimes I attack are not only offences against heaven, but against all good men, against society, against humanity, against virtue, against reason, and, in some things, against nature; crimes that modest words cannot, without great difficulty, explain, modest tongues express, nor modest ears, without blushing, hear mentioned.

As no sober mind can receive the ideas of them, without entertaining the utmost aversion

to the facts; so none that ever I met with, that had any common share of breeding and manners, could bear the mention of them, especially in the common dialect of those I call the criminals.

None but a set of people with faces of steel, who can triumph in their victory over religion, conscience, and the thoughts of eternity, that have got the better both of education, and of all manner of principles. These may glory indeed in their shame; and these are the people our satire desires to expose.

As to their persons, nothing but universal contempt of them can have any effect; nothing can assist them to blush but a general hiss from man. kind, and being thrust off the stage by the very worst of men. I have heard it was the foundation of a very scandalous, vicious person's reformation, when another more notorious fellow than himself reproved him in this manner: "Fie, Jack, why, thou art worse than I am."

There are so many lives of crime, which yet come short of these lawful sinners, that a thief, a drunkard, a swearer, a profligate, may come to a man talking———, as I have mentioned, and say, "Fie, Mr G, Fie, Mr H, Fie, Mr L why, you are worse than I am."

Why may we not hope to see the time, when the worst of common offenders shall stop their ears at the wickedness of these, and when the very scandals of the times shall blush for, and reprove them. This universal contempt of them, this general aversion, if anything on earth can work upon them, will have some effect; there are few guilty men hardened against the battery of general clamour; it seems to be an assault to be resisted only by innocence; crime must certainly fall under it; innocence may hold up the head in such a storm, but guilt will certainly and soon founder, and suffer shipwreck.

Indeed, there seems to be some affinity in crime, between the people who we are now censuring, and another horrid modern generation, too vile to name, and yet who seems to be seeking protection under these. There may be indeed an essential difference, but in what small and minute articles does it exist! But as the particulars will not admit a nearer inquiry, I think the better way is to reject both with contempt, with an abhorrence suitable to the vileness of the facts, and cast them out together.

This will aid the modest part of the world in their just opposition to all indecency; and if we did nothing else, our work would recommend itself to that part of mankind which are really most valuable; and as for the rest, let them act as they please, their approbation will add no credit to the cause.

I have now done. I have said not all I had to say, but all I have room to say here; and having brought the very conclusion to a close, I would only add one thing by way of challenge to that part of mankind, who I may have touched in this satire, and who, for ought I know, may be angry; for, indeed, they have nothing else left for it, but to be angry, and rail at the reproof; according to a known distich used upon a like occasion :➡ "That disputants, when reasons fail,

Have one sure refuge left, and that's to rail." Now in this case, I say, I have a fair offer to make to those gentlemen in a few words, viz.

1. Let them prove that the fact here reprehended is not in being; that it is all a fiction or shadow, a man of straw; that there is nothing in it, and that I am in the wrong. Or,

2. That if it is in being, that though the fact is true, and though such things are done, they merit no satire, that they ought not to be reproved or exposed; I say, let them do this, and then they shall rail their fill, and treat me, and the work which I have just now finished, in as scandalous a manner as they please. Or,

3. Which I had much rather they should do, let them reform; take the hint, fall under the reproof, and at once sink the crime.

I confess it seems rational that one or other of these should be done: the two first, which are in some respects the same, I am out of fear of; the last seems a debt; it is just I should demand it; let them repel the charge, or reform the practice.

If they cannot do the first, and yet contemn the last, I declare war against them; and if I live to appear again in the field, let them expect no quarter; for the satire has not spent all its artillery, or shot all its shafts. My next attack shall be personal, and I may come to black lists, histories of facts, registers of time, with name and surname ; for no man, sure, in a christian government as this is, need be afraid of laying hell open, or drawing the pictures of men when they are turned devils.

I might say a word or two more with respect to style. I think I can have given no offence in decency of expression: if anything has, notwithstanding the utmost care, slipped my pen, let it be a defence, that I profess it is undesigned; the whole tenour of the work is calculated to bear down vice, vicious practices, and vicious language; and, I think, I may claim a favourable construction where there seems a fault, if it were really a slip of the pen: I may claim it as a debt due to a modest intention; declaring again, there is not one word willingly passed over that can be censured, as evidently leading to or encouraging indecency, no, not in thought. An evil mind may corrupt the chastest design; as in reading the explanation of the words, "I will," in the marriage covenant, which, I say, is a solemn oath, and that as plain as if it had been expressed, as swearing by the name of God. Sure none can be offended as if I put the sacred name of God into the mouths of the readers upon a light occasion, making them take the name of God in vain, or making them repeat an oath in the most vulgar and coarsest way. But if any man should be so weak, not to say malicious, let them know, that I think the expression carries with it a due reverence of the name of God; and that the occasion is awful and solemn; and if I had said, "So help me, God," it had been the same thing: the meaning is, to convince men that, how slight soever men may pass over the marriage covenant, it is a solemn appeal to God for the truth of the intention; and a solemn binding themselves in his name and presence, to a strict performance of the conditions; and that he that breaks them breaks a most sacred oath, and is as much perjured as if he had been so in the ordinary form.

END.