on, and
may very likely end by running off with an heiress--or a cook-maid
(for who knows what strange freaks Love may choose to play in his own
particular person? and I hold a man to be a mean creature who calculates
about checking any such sacred impulse as lawful love)--I say, though
despising the sex in general for their conduct to me, I know of
particular persons belonging to it who are worthy of all respect and
esteem, and as such I beg leave to point out the particular young lady
who is perusing these lines. Do not, dear madam, then imagine that if
I knew you I should be disposed to sneer at you. Ah, no! Fitz-Boodle's
bosom has tenderer sentiments than from his way of life you would fancy,
and stern by rule is only too soft by practice. Shall I whisper to you
the story of one or two of my attachments? All terminating fatally
(not in death, but in disappointment, which, as it occurred, I used
to imagine a thousand times more bitter than death, but from which one
recovers somehow more readily than from the other-named complaint)--all,
I say, terminating wretchedly to myself, as if some fatality pursued my
desire to become a domestic character.

* He is five-and-forty, if he is a day old.--O. Y.

My first love--no, let us pass THAT over. Sweet one! thy name shall
profane no hireling page. Sweet, sweet memory! Ah, ladies, those
delicate hearts of yours have, too, felt the throb. And between the
last 'ob' in the word throb and the words now written, I have passed a
delicious period of perhaps an hour, perhaps a minute, I know not how
long, thinking of that holy first love and of her who inspired it. How
clearly every single incident of the passion is remembered by me!
and yet 'twas long, long since. I was but a child then--a child at
school--and, if the truth must be told, L--ra R-ggl-s (I would not write
her whole name to be made one of the Marquess of Hertford's executors)
was a woman full thirteen years older than myself; at the period of
which I write she must have been at least five-and-twenty. She and her
mother used to sell tarts, hard-bake, lollipops, and other such simple
comestibles, on Wednesdays and Saturdays (half-holidays), at a private
school where I received the first rudiments of a classical education.
I used to go and sit before her tray for hours, but I do not think the
poor girl ever supposed any motive led me so constantly to her little
stall beyond a vulgar longing for her tarts and her gin