e: he looks about
fifty, but is not so much; change of climate has almost always the
disagreable effect of adding some years to the look.

He is dressing, to accompany me to the masquerade; I must attend
him: I have only time to say,

I am yours,
Ed. Rivers.

LETTER 220.

To Mrs. Rivers, Bellfield, Rutland.

London, Nov. 18, twelve at night.

Who should I dine and sup with to-day, at a merchant's in the city,
but your old love, Sir George Clayton, as gay and amusing as ever!

What an entertaining companion have you lost, my dear Emily!

He was a little disconcerted at seeing me, and blushed extremely;
but soon recovered his amiable, uniform insipidity of countenance, and
smiled and simpered as usual.

He never enquired after you, nor even mentioned your name; being
asked for a toast, I had the malice to give Rivers; he drank him,
without seeming ever to have heard of him before.

The city misses admire him prodigiously, and he them; they are
charmed with his beauty, and he with their wit.

His mother, poor woman! could not bring the match she wrote about to
bear: the family approved him; but the fair one made a better choice,
and gave herself last week, at St. George's, Hanover-square, to a very
agreable fellow of our acquaintance, Mr. Palmer; a man of sense and
honor, who deserves her had she been ten times richer: he has a small
estate in Lincolnshire, and his house is not above twenty miles from
you: I must bring you and Mrs. Palmer acquainted.

I suppose you are now the happiest of beings; Rivers finding a
thousand new beauties in his _belle paisanne_, and you exulting in
your charms, or, in other words, glorying in your strength.

So the maiden aunts in your neighbourhood think Miss Williams no
better than she should be?

Either somebody has said, or the idea is my own; after all, I
believe it Shenstone's, That those are generally the best people, whose
characters have been most injured by slanderers, as we usually find
that the best fruit which the birds have been pecking at.

I will, however, allow appearances were a little against your
cottager; and I would forgive the good old virgins, if they had always
as suspicious circumstances to determine from.

But they generally condemn from trifling indiscretions, and settle
the characters of their own sex from their conduct at a time of life
when they are themselves no judges of its propriety; they pass sentence
on them for