f his limbs, were more attractive
than the delicate proportions of his companion. He accordingly reigned
paramount among those inamoratas who were turned of thirty, without
being under the necessity of proceeding by tedious addresses, and was
thought to have co-operated with the waters in removing the sterility of
certain ladies, who had long undergone the reproach and disgust of their
husbands; while Peregrine set up his throne among those who laboured
under the disease of celibacy, from the pert miss of fifteen, who,
with a fluttering heart, tosses her head, bridles up, and giggles
involuntarily at sight of a handsome young man, to the staid maid of
twenty-eight, who, with a demure aspect, moralizes on the vanity of
beauty, the folly of youth, and simplicity of woman, and expatiates
on friendship, benevolence, and good sense, in the style of a Platonic
philosopher.

In such a diversity of dispositions, his conquests were attended with
all the heart-burnings, animosities, and turmoils of jealousy and spite.
The younger class took all opportunities of mortifying their seniors
in public, by treating them with that indignity which, contrary to the
general privilege of age, is, by the consent and connivance of mankind,
leveled against those who have the misfortune to come under the
denomination of old maids; and these last retorted their hostilities
in the private machinations of slander, supported by experience and
subtilty of invention. Not one day passed in which some new story did
not circulate, to the prejudice of one or other of those rivals.

If our hero, in the long-room, chanced to quit one of the moralists,
with whom he had been engaged in conversation, he was immediately
accosted by a number of the opposite faction, who, with ironical smiles,
upbraided him with cruelty to the poor lady he had left, exhorted him to
have compassion on her sufferings; and, turning their eyes towards
the object of their intercession, broke forth into a universal peal of
laughter. On the other hand, when Peregrine, in consequence of having
danced with one of the minors overnight, visited her in the morning,
the Platonists immediately laid hold on the occasion, tasked their
imaginations, associated ideas, and, with sage insinuations, retailed a
thousand circumstances of the interview, which never had any foundation
in truth. They observed, that, if girls are determined to behave with
such indiscretion, they must lay their accounts wi