om they are scarcely known, or by whom they have been
rejected; destroy in a drunken frolick the happiness of families; blast
the bloom of beauty, and intercept the reward of virtue.

Other artifices of falsehood, though utterly unworthy of an ingenuous
mind, are not yet to be ranked with flagitious enormities, nor is it
necessary to incite sanguinary justice against them, since they may be
adequately punished by detection and laughter. The traveller who
describes cities which he has never seen; the squire, who, at his return
from London, tells of his intimacy with nobles to whom he has only bowed
in the park or coffee-house; the author who entertains his admirers with
stories of the assistance which he gives to wits of a higher rank; the
city dame who talks of her visits at great houses, where she happens to
know the cook-maid, are surely such harmless animals as truth herself
may be content to despise without desiring to hurt them.

But of the multitudes who struggle in vain for distinction, and display
their own merits only to feel more acutely the sting of neglect, a great
part are wholly innocent of deceit, and are betrayed, by infatuation and
credulity, to that scorn with which the universal love of praise incites
us all to drive feeble competitors out of our way.

Few men survey themselves with so much severity, as not to admit
prejudices in their own favour, which an artful flatterer may gradually
strengthen, till wishes for a particular qualification are improved to
hopes of attainment, and hopes of attainment to belief of possession.
Such flatterers every one will find, who has power to reward their
assiduities. Wherever there is wealth there will be dependance and
expectation, and wherever there is dependance, there will be an
emulation of servility.

Many of the follies which provoke general censure, are the effects of
such vanity as, however it might have wantoned in the imagination, would
scarcely have dared the publick eye, had it not been animated and
emboldened by flattery. Whatever difficulty there may be in the
knowledge of ourselves, scarcely any one fails to suspect his own
imperfections, till he is elevated by others to confidence. We are
almost all naturally modest and timorous; but fear and shame are uneasy
sensations, and whosoever helps to remove them is received with
kindness.

Turpicula was the heiress of a large estate, and having lost her mother
in her infancy, was committed to a gover