not
believe them, though I know you are liable to it, as you have admirers;
for all are not infatuated with Miss Jennings: the handsome Sydney ogles
you; Lord Rochester is delighted with your conversation; and the most
serious Sir Lyttleton forsakes his natural gravity in favour of your
charms. As for the first, I confess his figure is very likely to engage
the inclinations of a young person like yourself; but were his outward
form attended with other accomplishments, which I know it is not, and
that his sentiments in your favour were as real as he endeavours to
persuade you they are, and as you deserve, yet I would not advise you
to form any connections with him, for reasons which I cannot tell you
at present.

"Sir Lyttleton is undoubtedly in earnest, since he appears ashamed of the
condition to which you have reduced him; and I really believe if he could
get the better of those vulgar chimerical apprehensions, of being what is
vulgarly called a cuckold, the good man would marry you, and you would be
his representative in his little government, where you might merrily pass
your days in casting up the weekly bills of housekeeping, and in darning
old napkins. What a glory would it be to have a Cato for a husband,
whose speeches are as many lectures, and whose lectures are composed of
nothing but ill-nature and censure!

"Lord Rochester is, without contradiction, the most witty man in all
England; but then he is likewise the most unprincipled, and devoid even
of the least tincture of honour; he is dangerous to our sex alone; and
that to such a degree that there is not a woman who gives ear to him
three times, but she irretrievably loses her reputation. No woman can
escape him, for he has her in his writings, though his other attacks be
ineffectual; and in the age we live in, the one is as bad as the other in
the eye of the public. In the mean time nothing is more dangerous than
the artful insinuating manner with which he gains possession of the mind:
he applauds your taste, submits to your sentiments, and at the very
instant that he himself does not believe a single word of what he is
saying, he makes you believe it all. I dare lay a wager, that from the
conversation you have had with him, you thought him one of the most
honourable and sincerest men living; for my part I cannot imagine what he
means by the assiduity he pays you not but your accomplishments are
sufficient to excite the adoration and praise of the whole