Countenance, I shall spare no Charge to
make my Scholars in their very Features and Limbs bear witness how
careful I have been in the other Parts of their Education.

I am, SIR,
Your most humble Servant,
Rachael Watchful

T.

* * * * *

No. 377. Tuesday, May 13, 1712. Addison.

'Quid quisque vitet, nunquam homini satis
Cautum est in horas--'

Hor.

Love was the Mother of Poetry, and still produces, among the most
ignorant and barbarous, a thousand imaginary Distresses and Poetical
Complaints. It makes a Footman talk like Oroondates, and converts a
brutal Rustick into a gentle Swain. The most ordinary Plebeian or
Mechanick in Love, bleeds and pines away with a certain Elegance and
Tenderness of Sentiments which this Passion naturally inspires.

These inward Languishings of a Mind infected with this Softness, have
given birth to a Phrase which is made use of by all the melting Tribe,
from the highest to the lowest, I mean that of dying for Love.

Romances, which owe their very Being to this Passion, are full of these
metaphorical Deaths. Heroes and Heroines, Knights, Squires, and Damsels,
are all of them in a dying Condition. There is the same kind of
Mortality in our Modern Tragedies, where every one gasps, faints, bleeds
and dies. Many of the Poets, to describe the Execution which is done by
this Passion, represent the Fair Sex as Basilisks that destroy with
their Eyes; but I think Mr. Cowley has with greater Justness of Thought
compared a beautiful Woman to a Porcupine, that sends an Arrow from
every Part. [1]

I have often thought, that there is no way so effectual for the Cure of
this general Infirmity, as a Man's reflecting upon the Motives that
produce it. When the Passion proceeds from the Sense of any Virtue or
Perfection in the Person beloved, I would by no means discourage it; but
if a Man considers that all his heavy Complaints of Wounds and Deaths
rise from some little Affectations of Coquetry, which are improved into
Charms by his own fond Imagination, the very laying before himself the
Cause of his Distemper, may be sufficient to effect the Cure of it.

It is in this view that I have looked over the several Bundles of
Letters which I have received from Dying People, and composed out of
them the following Bill of Mortality, which I shall lay before my Reader
without any further Preface, as ho