ld manage with
the current of it; and what were the consequences, together with
the number of adventures which befell me in the exercise of my new
profession, will compose the mater of another letter: for surely it is
high time to put a period! to this.

I am,

MADAM,

Yours, etc., etc., etc.

THE END OF THE FIRST LETTER

LETTER THE SECOND

Madam:

If I have delayed the sequel of my history, it has been purely to allow
myself a little breathing time not without some hopes, that, instead of
pressing me to a continuation, you would have acquitted me of the task
of pursuing a confession, in the course of which my self-esteem has so
many wounds to sustain.

I imagined, indeed, that you would have been cloyed and tired with
uniformity of adventures and expressions, inseparable from a subject of
this sort, whose bottom, or groundwork being, in the nature of things
eternally one and the same, whatever variety of forms and modes the
situations are susceptible of, there is no escaping a repetition of
near the same images, the same figures, the same expressions, with this
further inconvenience added to the disgust it creates, that the words
Joys, Ardours, Transports, Extasies and the rest of those pathetic terms
so congenial to, so received in the Practice of Pleasure, flatten
and lose much of their due spirit and energy by the frequency they
indispensably recur with, in a narrative of which that Practice
professedly composes the whole basis. I must therefore trust to the
candour of your judgment, for your allowing for the disadvantage I
am necessarily under in that respect; and to your imagination and
sensibility, the pleasing taks of repairing it, by their supplements,
where my descriptions flag or fail: the one will readily place the
pictures I present before your eyes; the other give life to the colours
where they are dull, or worn with too frequent handling.

What you say besides, by way of encouragement concerning the extreme
difficulty of continuing so long in one strain, in a mean tempered with
taste, between the revoltingness of gross, rank and vulgar expressions,
and the ridicule of mincing metaphors and affected circumlocutions, is
so sensible, as well as good-natured, that you greatly justify me to
myself for my compliance with a curiosity that is to be satisfied so
extremely at my expense.

Resuming now where I broke off in my last, I am in my way to remark to
you, that it was late in the ev