laugh at your ideal virtue,
and act with men like the potters, who dash the work of their hands to
pieces if it does not please their fancy. He is one of those who think
themselves justified, by their experience, to consider the entire race of
men as a pack of wolves who will devour all who put confidence in them.
Nothing delights him more than to carry on an intricate state-plot; and
he treats a maiden as he does a rose which he plucks from the
stalk,--inhales the sweetness, and then very coolly treads it under foot.

_Faustus_. Malicious devil! and can the man thou hast depicted to me be
the bosom friend of the Prince of ---?

_Devil_. Time will show what he is to him. I tell thee there is
something going forward. Didst thou, by the by, observe the minister
this evening?

_Faustus_. He appeared sad and melancholy.

_Devil_. He, now, is one of those whom you call honest men. He is just,
noble-minded, and attentive to the duties of his situation; but, like all
of you, he has a foible to counterbalance his virtues; this is an
unbounded tenderness for the other sex: and as he, out of principle,
required the blessing of the priest to his pleasures, so did he, after
the death of his first wife, make a fool of himself by marrying the woman
whom you have seen. Through a few hours' enjoyment he destroyed the
fabric of his fortune. She took advantage of his doting fondness, and
wasted in luxury, dress, and play, her, his, and his children's property,
and involved him in debts to an immense amount. It is true she found in
Baron H., whom you know, and who is sole master in the house, a powerful
coadjutor. When they were completely aground, and their desires had
become more craving in proportion as the difficulty of gratifying them
increased, the lady readily agreed to a plan which her minion proposed to
her in private, and which was nothing else "than to sell the honour of
her stepdaughter, under an equivocal promise of marriage, at as high a
price as the favourite would buy it." The minister had not the slightest
suspicion of all this; he only felt his lack of money, the weight of his
debts, the full mass of his folly, and trembled in momentary expectation
of the arrival of his son, whom the wife had driven from home in order
that she might dissipate his property. The poor youth had in the
interval departed for the Turkish wars, and had been rewarded for his
interference with a wooden arm. I do not say that the